April My Monthly Hero Countdown: Idea #1 + Giveaway!

It's time for another My Monthly Hero countdown! The April kit will launch on Monday, April 4 at 1pm Eastern/10am Pacific. Continue to stop by our blog throughout the weekend for a bunch of fabulous ideas from our team for using our gorgeous new kit. And comment on each and every countdown post - we'll giveaway one kit before you can buy it to one lucky blog reader, pulled from the comments left on every Countdown to Creativity post! Now let's join Yana for the first look at this month's kit!

I always find watercolor to be very relaxing and calming and it is rather forgiving too, even if you make a mistake you can fix it with a bit of water or work your way around it. My favorite way to watercolor is wet watercolor. I like to lay a coat of clean clear water to the entire image and only after that come in with a bit of color. This allows me to achieve beautiful gradation of color and I can easily go from very dark to almost white.

Here's a card I created using Hero Arts April kit which is perfect to practice your water coloring skills.

I started by stamping the flower image from the kit several times onto Arches Cold Press Watercolor paper, added water and colored using Daniel Smith watercolors. I used Ultramarine Turquoise, Cadmium Yellow Deep Hue, Quinacridone Gold, Green Gold and Serpentine Genuine.

I cut the flower layers out, shaped the petals a bit with my fingers and foam mounted together for added dimension. I did the same for the laves. I believe that shaping petals and leaves with fingers really helps to add to the realistic look. I find its best to shape these while watercolor paper is still wet, it makes it much easier to manipulate the fibers.

I wanted to create a rather simple card on a white background, but when I added my flower onto a white cardbase I felt it looked plain so I stamped additional leaves and flower buds using [hero_product_link sku="AF236" text="Charcoal Ink"]. I also heat embossed the Thank You sentiment in [hero_product_link sku="PW110" text="White Embossing Powder"] over black cardstock for a contrasting effect. Lastly,  I added several gems from the [hero_product_link sku="CH283" text="Pool Gem Set"].

Be sure to stop by later today for another look at this gorgeous kit!