Guest Designer: Ashlea Cornell

Hi there! This is Ashlea from Ashlea_Crafts.com and I'm thrilled to be here on The Gray Muse blog with you today. For those of you who don't know me, I am primarily a card maker. I use creative stamps to make cards and gifts for my friends and family, and I couldn't wait to get my hands on these beautiful sets from The Gray Muse. 

With the holidays coming up, I'm now gearing toward creating homemade gifts. I love being able to give something one of a kind that I created especially for someone as a gift and the Be Kind and Hugs Stamp sets are perfect for this! To begin I stamped the Be Kind stamp onto a piece of 4.25" x 5.5" watercolor paper with VersaFine Onyx Black ink. To stamp I used my Mini MISTI and this will become especially important later, so be sure to use a stamp positioner. After stamping, I did NOT remove the stamp from the MISTI but left it where it was and set it aside for later. Now It was time to start my watercoloring.

I used Daniel Smith tube watercolors which I'm still learning my way around. The colors I used are Quin Lilac, Quin Gold, Undersea, Burnt Sienna Light, and Wisteria. For the effect of the watercolor fading from dark to light, I first apply fully saturated watercolor to the base of a single flower petal, then use clean water to gradually pull the saturation out. I use clean water 2-3 times per petal to get a lighter hue each time I pull the watercolor out onto the rest of the petal. The same principle goes for the leaves as well. After I finished watercoloring all of the elements except the "BE KIND" words, I let it dry and then used a Copic marker in B29 to color in all around the images. This gives the appearance of a dark card stock and gives striking contrasts the colors in the image. 

Finally, I put the panel back into my Mini MISTI and stamped the image over the existing image with VersaMark watermark ink. I used gold embossing powder and heat set it with my heat gun to finish it off for shiny, gold details throughout. To get it ready to gift, I found a square frame and a matte that fit the card panel. I love the finished look this gives the piece and makes it look like a real piece of art. I can't wait to give this to my sister for Christmas, but for now it can live on the shelf in my craft room! 

Thank you so much for stopping by, and thank you to Ruby for having me as a guest for The Gray Muse! I hope to see you again soon!