Happy National Scrapbooking Day!!

It’s a thing! For real! A whole day devoted to the love of scrapbooking    🙂

I was so very happy to contribute a little project for all the fun stuff going on over at Studio Calico today. My assignment was to use watercolors in a project to make a background or an embellishment or whatever other creative ideas I could come up with. I’m a girl who does a lot of “planning” on the computer for my scrapbook projects, so this was a little bit outside of my norm…but I was excited to give it a whirl. Here’s what I came up with…I knew I wanted to document this story the moment I took this photo! I have a very vivid memory of being caught out in the rain as a teenager while on a hike with my mom and my brother. We headed for home and the entire way back, I was MISERABLE!! I hated the rain. Perhaps that foul mood had something to do with just being a teenager, but my intense dislike for being out in the rain stuck. Liam and Emily…they LOVE rainy days!! They’re just as happy on rainy days as they are on sunny days to be outside playing, but rain gear to play in and puddles to splash in bring a whole new level of excitement    🙂 On this particular day, Emily and I were picking Liam up from school and it was one of those wet and rainy days that spring is famous for. They were so happy, and I just wanted to enjoy the moment. They danced and twirled and splashed and played for a good 45 minutes out in the rain. Watching them made me feel happy too. I have an entirely new appreciation for rainy days thanks to these guys.

SO, the idea of rainy days and puddles somehow connected for me with trying out some watercolor paints. I decided to try creating a “mask” with two different techniques and thought it would be fun to share my process and the outcomes.

Ali Edwards has a new digital stamp set all about rainy days and sunshine and it’s really awesome. So many pieces from that set were relevant to this layout! I came across an idea on Pinterest that showed using a white crayon to make a design and then add watercolor paints on top. In Photoshop Elements, I created a 6×8 canvas and added a “rainy days” digital stamp but turned the opacity of that layer waaaay down (6%) so you was just barely visible when printed. I printed it out on the back side of some white cardstock (less textured, I thought it might help get a “sharper” image) and found a white crayon in my kids art supply stash, tracing over the design.I tried painting over the crayon with blue watercolor paints, watering it down as needed. The result was very subtle…not quite as sharp or vivid as I had hoped it would be.I think I might chock this one up to a “Pinterest fail”, just because it didn’t quite capture the look I was going for. I’ll keep it in mind for the future if I need something really subtle.

The second strategy I tried was just using letter stickers as a “mask”. The letter stickers in Studio Calico’s Odyssey scrapbook kit are such an awesome font! I wanted to make sure they would peel off the cardstock easily when I wanted them too, so I stuck them to my pants and peeled them off before adhering them to the paper…just the right amount of tackiness 😉 I should mention that I used the back of the cardstock for this strategy too (the less textured side) in hopes that it would minimize the amount of paint that leaked under the stickers. I painted over top of the letter stickers, trying to use a more concentrated colour in the middle and watering it down as I worked my way out.It only took a few minutes for the paint and paper to dry. Then I peeled up the stickers and got this!Loved it! You can see some spots where the borders of the letters aren’t perfectly crisp, but I’m really okay with that! It just adds to the “rainy” effect 😉So here’s the end result of both techniques…

I definitely preferred the letter sticker mask for this particular project and used it to complete my layout. I ran this page through my printer to add some journaling, and added just a few strips of patterned paper and embellishments from the Odyssey scrapbook kit. Those acrylic stars are a favourite for sure! I’ll be sad when I run out of them.

So there you have it! Hope you get a chance to do something crafty this weekend 🙂