No-Lines Watercoloring - Sami Stamps Re-Release!!

Hi everyone and happy Friday!!
I hope you've had a fabulous week and are ready for an amazing weekend!  We're having a birthday party for Matthew on Sunday so I'm going to be baking my little heart out!

Today Sami is re-releasing one of her past image sets, and it's one of my favorites, so you have to go check it out!  The set is called Butterflies and will steal your heart :)

I worked with the same image I used when this set first came out because I just absolutely adore it!

The image is Butterfly Flower and is so gorgeous!  I decided to push my watercoloring a little bit on this one...it may have gotten a little out of control but I think that's what makes it so beautiful.

To really make it stand out, I did a no-lines coloring on the image as well.  Printing on watercolor paper can be a pain because once you add water, the printer ink will smear.  So I needed to find a way to get the image onto my paper without having to print it.  I decided to do a transfer, which was done by printing the image onto vellum, tracing the image on the backside, and then laying that vellum (facing up with the pencil lines down) onto my watercolor paper and rubbing it with my bone folder to transfer the pencil lines.

Depending on how hard you push, you can get dark lines or light lines.  I did this several times because each one turned out different, so by the time I got to doing this one in particular, my pencil lines had lightened up quite a bit.  If they were too dark in some places, I just lightly erased them before painting.

Painting without any lines isn't really that difficult.  You still apply your darkest colors in the shadows and make sure your colors go all the way out to the image lines to fill it all in.  The nice thing with this technique is it looks more natural instead of having a dark black line around the outside.

I also did a little splattering with this image...as I said, it went a little crazy :)  To get the bursts of paint coming out of the image in a few spots, I simply applied clean water around the outside of the area I wanted the paint to "bloom" and then connected that clean water to the wet paint.  The water picks up that paint and spreads it into the clean water.  I added more paint as needed to get it to spread as much as I wanted and then did a little splattering for more detail.

The background was made separately, and I did basically the same type of "bloom" technique for it so that it looked like the paint continued out from the image.  Added a lot of splatters and then used the Zig Zag Dots stencil from Simon Says Stamp with some Wendy Vecchi embossing paste to add more texture and detail.

Super crazy card, but I'm so in love with it!!  And that was a giant wall of text, but I hope you made it through all that!  It was a lot to explain and I wanted to be sure you had the full details so you can give this fun technique a try!

If you do, let me know about it in the comments below!!

I'd like to enter this card into the following challenges:
    Addicted to Stamps and More #162-Make Your Mark
    Word Art Wednesday #201-Anything Goes

Thanks so much for visiting!  Be sure to stop by Sami Stamps to see the rest of the DT's creations with this awesome image set!! <3