Struggling with Loose Watercolouring

CAS Mix Up wants "loose watercolouring" this month.  It's not something I'm very good at but I've given it a whirl.  Here are a couple of my attempts (and an extra card that is not loose).

I stamped and heat embossed the wildflowers in platinum - that normally keeps the watercolour painting inside the lines but in this case I started by putting down a lot of water - enough that it went outside of the embossed lines.  I added dabs of orange and yellow watercolour paints and let some of it overflow outside of the flowers.

While I had the stamp and supplies out, I did a second one but did my normal "inside the lines" watercolouring - so much easier for me to do.  I think it's a holdover from my childhood when I worked so hard at learning to paint inside the lines in my colouring books!

I made it into a very plain simple card and am feeling so-so about it.  Maybe it's just too much the "old style" of card I used to make and not interesting enough for what I like to do now!!!

My other attempt at loose watercolouring is this one:

 

I put the poppies stamp in my MISTI and inked up the flowers with an orange Tombow marker and the stems in green, spritzed the stamp and stamped on watercolour paper.  With a wet brush I pulled the orange out of the stamped lines and went in with a couple of other shades of orange markers and a wet brush.  By the time I was done, I'd lost all the lines and definition of the flowers so put the paper back in the MISTI and restamped the flowers with a dark brown ink.  Not sure how I feel about this but I finished it off as a birthday card for a friend who loves orange.

Will I do much loose watercolouring in future?  Maybe, but maybe not.  I love watercolouring images for my cards but I think I'm too rigid or particular to really go with the looser style!  But I loved having the CAS Mix Up challenge to make me try a couple of techniques I wouldn't otherwise have tried!

So an interesting day of making three cards, none of which thrill me.  I'll be back to Christmas cards with my next post and hopefully feeling more confident!

CAS Mix-Up

 

 

Supplies for card 1 and 2:
Stamps - Indigo Blue wildflowers, SU sentiment on card 2
Ink - ColorBox Gold
Paper - watercolour paper, cream cs, dull gold shimmer cs
Size - A2
Accessories - Gansai Tambi watercolour paints, platinum embossing powder, fun foam, SU label punch on card 2

Supplies for card 3:
Stamps - Penny Black poppies, SU sentiment
Ink - Archival Potting Soil
Paper - watercolour paper, cream and dark brown cs
Size - A2
Accessories - Tombow markers, MFT wonky stitched rectangle die, Spellbinders tag die, twine, fun foam, gems