Stamping Sisters Mini Winter Camp - Day 2

Welcome to the Stamping Sisters Mini Winter Camp 2021.  Last year our first Stamping Sisters Mini Card Camp occurred June, thanks to our dear friend Kelly.  Once Kelly set up all of the details, the rest of us just couldn't resist joining in!  

We all had such a good time last summer that Barb stepped right up and agreed to  organize another round which is set for this week. Thanks Barb!

Here are our blogs and the days we are going to be the camp counselor:

Monday, January 25 ~  Barb @ inkingintoretirement

Tuesday, January 26 ~ Darlene (me!) @ Accordingtobijou

Wednesday, January 27 ~ Kelly @ Sandcastlestamper

Thursday January 28 ~ Jeanette @ Creativeplay

OK...my class, along with my "tutorial" is "Reflection Technique".  Why do I have "tutorial" in quotes???  Because my card is a lesson in what went wrong!  Hahahahaha!  I can't wait to see what you all can do RIGHT!  I do hope that you  play along and have fun in our winter virtual stamp camp!

  So...My idea was to watercolor a landscape with sky, earth and lake.  Then create silhouettes of trees using SU's timeless classic "Lovely as a Tree" set.

For this project I decided to use pencils and a rough water color paper because the texture would add to the landscape.  I used a very fine brush so that I could control the water and blending.  Didn't want my sky to turn green if blue and yellow mixed!

Here is the background panel...before I decided that the lake needed colors from the sky reflected in it.  You might NOT want to do this hahaha.

Here you can see the SU watercolor pencils and tiny paintbrush that I used to limit the amount of water while blending.

After the blending was (sort of) done, I trimmed the panel to match the CS that would frame it on the card stock.

Then the real "lessons learned" began!

As you all know by this picture, I masked off portions of the long stamp in the set which has multiple trees, picking and choosing which trees I wanted in the landscape.

DON'T DO THIS!  Why? Well, in order to make the reflection in the water you need to stamp it upside down from the initial image.  Which meant that I needed to carefully remove ink from the stamp and try to line it up under the original image...some of the trees are overlapping on the stamp, making it difficult at best.

Oh! Another thing that I would not do again is include so much of the yellow and coral reflection colors in the lake.  I think it is too distracting.  

Here's another big lesson: I used Memento Tuxedo Black and it's too light on the original set of trees and even lighter after stamping it off once to make the reflected image.  Use a darker, more juicy ink because the watercolor paper absorbs so much of the ink.  But remember to stamp off the reflected image first before applying it to your panel.

I read that you could stamp your image onto an acrylic block, then use the acrylic block to apply the reflected image to your panel.  Here's me trying to line up the acrylic block so that I can stamp the trees and use the block to then stamp the reflection.

DON'T DO THIS.  Hahaha

Epic fail. I ended up with a bunch of black smudges in my lake.  

Which is why I added the sky colors to help cover it.  Sigh.

What I ended up doing was painstakingly inking and wiping off areas of the stamp that I didn't want to make individual tree reflections. If I just stamped the whole panel without mixing up the trees, I would not have had to do this for the reflection.

Back in 2012 (really that long ago?) I posted a reflection card using vellum with the reflected and colored image.  

Flip the vellum over and you have an instant reflection of the original image.  This time I wanted to try the reflection technique without vellum and using watercolors and a silhouette image...I still think it's possible. 

I have every confidence that Jeanette, Barb and Kelly will prove me right!  Please visit their blogs and see how they apply my lessons learned and create great reflection cards!

I can't wait to see your lovely Reflection Cards and learn from you!  Hopefully my tips and lessons learned help you make a masterpiece.