Easy & Vibrant Watercolor with Zig Markers

Who is ready for Spring? I know I am! While I do love Christmas and all of the fun crafts and decorations that come with the holidays, I am not a fan of the cold. Once the decorations come down, Spring and all of the glorious colors that come with it can’t get here fast enough for me!

If you’ve been here long, you know what that means around here, florals and more florals! And I can’t think of a better way to say hello to our dear friend Spring than this vibrant burst of color!

I pulled out our Beautiful Bouquet: Mums for this mini slimline beauty. I started by stamping two bouquets in Versamark ink onto a panel of Vicki Boutin Foundations paper and heat embossed them using white embossing powder. Heat embossing is a no fail trick for achieving stunning results with watercolor and it’s a great technique for beginners.

The heat embossed image creates channels to hold the color as you add it. This allows the colors to stay separate as you paint your image and keeps them from spreading more than you want, or mixing where you don’t want them to.

Today, I chose to pull out ZIG Clean Color Markers for my watercolor medium. You could use any water based marker, traditional watercolors, or even your Distress Inks for this this. I just hadn’t used my ZIGs in several years and decided to put them to work. I scribbled a little color directly on my image and then used a damp paint brush to pull and spread the color around. The more water you use, the more the color will dilute and the further it will spread. Play around with different amounts of water to see what results you like best, but a little goes a long way.

You can see in the close up, I wasn’t particularly careful. I purposely pulled the color beyond the embossed lines in some areas, and left some areas unpainted. The organic spontaneity of watercolor really adds to the charm of this. But you can chose to be as diligent with your coloring as you’d like. Once the first layer had dried, I added a second layer in some places.

I trimmed a second panel of Foundations paper to 3×6” and added a very light watery wash of blue. I then fussy cut out my two bouquets and adhered one at the top of the panel and one at the bottom using foam adhesive. I trimmed any excess hanging off the edges so it was flush with my blue background panel. I adhered that to a 3.25 x 6.25” card base.

For the sentiment, I chose the Hello die from Honey Bee Stamps and paired it with the “Dear Friend” sentiment from our Beautiful Bouquets: Dahlia stamp set. The Beautiful Bouquets are some of my favorite inexpensive sets for quick floral cards.

I finished the card of with a few dew drops, sequins and gems. I love the mix of cool and warm colors here and it certainly makes me yearn for Spring. How about you?

Featured Supplies

Some of the products used in this post were provided to me for free. I am not under any obligation to use or review these items unless otherwise noted. The following is a list of the featured supplies used in today’s project(s) along with links to purchase for convenience. Please note, this list contains affiliate links. Use of these links when shopping provides me with a small referral commission at no additional cost to you. Use is never expected, but always appreciated. Thank you for your support! ❤️

Tsukineko Versamark EMBOSS INK PAD Shop at: SSS	Precision Heat Embossing Tool Gun Hero Arts Shop at: SSS	EK Success CRAFT TWEEZERS Precision Tip Shop at: SSS	Wplus9 Beautiful Bouquet: Dahlia Stamps Shop at: WP9
WOW Super Fine Bright White Embossing Powder Shop at: SSS	Inkadinkado EMBOSSING MAGIC Powder Bag Shop at: SSS	Zig Clean Color Real Brush Marker LIGHT GREEN Shop at: SSS	Zig Clean Color Real Brush Marker BLUE Shop at: SSS
Zig Clean Color Real Brush Marker COBALT BLUE Shop at: SSS	Zig Clean Color Real Brush Marker OLIVE GREEN Shop at: SSS	Zig Clean Color Real Brush Marker WINE RED Shop at: SSS	Zig Clean Color Real Brush Marker YELLOW Shop at: SSS
Zig Clean Color Real Brush Marker BRIGHT YELLOW Shop at: SSS	MISTI Precision Stamping Tool Shop at: SSS	Tim Holtz Distress Sprayer Shop at: SSS	Gina K Designs Connect Glue Shop at: SSS | GKD
Princeton Velvetouch Round Size 5 Shop at: Blick	Scrapbook Adhesives Foam Squares mix Shop at: SSS	Neenah Classic Crest Solar White 110lb cardstock Shop at: SSS	Beautiful Bouquet: Mums Shop at: WP9
Honey Bee Stamps Hello Dies Shop at: SSS