Flower Medallion Builder with Nina-Marie

Happy Friday!  We're welcoming our April guest Nina-Marie back to the blog today.  Today she's showing us how to watercolor with solid images.  Here's Nina-Marie

Happy Friday everyone! I am excited to be bringing you a new watercolor video for you today which features a technique I am calling no-line layered watercolor.

I wanted to use Neat & Tangled’s new Flower Medallion Builder stamp set for this card and I also wanted to do some watercoloring. But… the images in this set are solid, not outlines. Did that stop me from watercoloring? Nope; let me tell you what I did to get around that.

I love that you can build your own custom medallion designs with this set; very unique and a lot of fun! I’ve seen tons of examples from other artists that used different colors of ink to make their own designs. The result is definitely striking. However, like I said before, I wanted to watercolor. And by taking a very light ink, I was able to stamp the images into the design I wanted and then color over top of that ink to create the watercolor look. The ink I used for stamping was Simon Says Stamp’s Barely Beige ink.

This technique is very easy; especially with bold, clean lined shapes, such as these stamps in the Flower Medallion Builder set.

For watercoloring the images in, you could use any watercolor medium you prefer. In this card, I used the Gansai Tambi watercolor palette (36 colors). This was my first time using it and so far have been happy with the results it gives.



One thing to note, as with many pan watercolors, is that you need to get the colors working in the palette with quite a bit of water. Some palettes and pans need more water than others. With the Gansai Tambi set, I found by misting the entire palette with a bit of water and allowing that to seep in, that it got the colors softened a little for me while I worked on other things.

Then, when I was ready to actually color, I dropped a little puddle of water – about the size of a penny – into the pans I wanted to use. If the colors are not saturated enough with water, they have a chalkiness to them. I prefer them to be smoother and creamier, so I am generous with the amount of water I use.



To embellish my watercolored medallions, I used Nuvo Jewel Drops in all the colors except for the gray. Because I had a rainbow of colors in my medallion, I wanted to make sure that they were embellished with the same colors in the Jewel Drops.

I am a big fan of the jewel drops because they create such a gorgeous, translucent dot of color. They almost have a “magical” feel! Check out the great dimension you get once they dry…



I hope you enjoy today’s video and see how much fun it can be to create a no-line watercolor effect with solid stamped images!


Thanks for spending some time with me… I’ll be back again very soon with a new tutorial for you!