Creating a Stained Glass Background

Hi everyone! Happy Tuesday!
We have a fun new challenge starting today over at Tuesday Throwdown - a Tic Tac Toe board!!
We also have a fabulous sponsor this week - DRS Designs, who has graciously provided my team with images to use on their cards.  I chose to use the Large Stained Glass image.  I thought it would make a perfect background, and why not follow it's name and do some stained glass painting on it!

I started by printing the background image onto some watercolor paper.  Then chose some very basic watercolors and set to work.  I first filled the space I wanted to color with clean clear water and then dropped my color in, moving around the image and then circling back to the previous spots to spread the color to the edges if it didn't make it with just the water.  I wanted there to be more red than any other color so I started with that one and filled in a lot of the little spaces.  Then went back in with the green and super watered down black so it would be grey.  The white spots actually have a really light blue in them.  I didn't want them to be left white but I didn't want another bright color to pull away from the Christmas colors...so I just did a light blue.

Once all of the paint was dry, I went over the light blue and red spots with my wink of stella clear glitter brush to add a little bit of shimmer.  Let that set and then traced over all the lines with a black sharpie.  My printer ink is running out so they weren't a nice bold black like I wanted, but they worked fine enough so I could paint them and then go back over them.

Once everything was completely dry, I smooshed my VersaMark ink pad over the whole thing!  This worried me a little.  I wasn't sure if all my paint would then transfer to the ink pad so I tested it first and it came out clean!  So I did the rest of the panel and then coated it with clear embossing powder and heated it till everything had melted and the whole panel had a nice glossy shine to it!  So perfect!

I cut out the large "Merry" with my Silhouette and layered it onto black cardstock.  Then white heat embossed the word Christmas onto some black cardstock as well.  I found a holly image in my digital collection (sorry...I don't know who it is from...) colored them up with my Shin Han markers and added them around the sentiments.

The last touch to everything was another coat of wink of stella and a little bit of star dust stickles on the berries!  This card turned out perfect!  I love how shiny the stained glass is and everything just gels together so well!!

I hope you will join us for this fun challenge!  Here is the tic tac toe board for this week:

I went right down the center with red & green, digital stamp, ribbon.

I'd like to enter this card into the following challenges:
    Creative Fingers #96-Anything Goes
    Ooh La La #192-Embossing
    Simon Says Stamp-Anything Goes

Thanks so much for visiting!! <3