for the love of watercolors...

it's no surprise that i love a white background.  i love that every page starts as a clean slate.  and of course, i love to add beautiful patterned paper to my backgrounds, but most of the time a good portion of white can be found somewhere.  

white backgrounds are really a blank canvas to me.  i love adding splatters of paint and mists, and now my new favorite is watercolor paints.  i love the effect watercolors leave on the paper.  hoping to find some time soon to play around a little more, but for now, i wanted to share two of my favorite layouts created using watercolors as my background base.

right now...

for this layout, i used a little bit of gesso first and then added my watercolors once the gesso dried.  the gesso acts like a barrier so the color doesn't absorb into the cardstock.

happy...

this layout was inspired by wilna's recent "in the mood to scrap" video at two peas in a bucket.  and believe it or not, this background actually started as a "mistake".  i love to play around with watercolors, but sometimes i feel like it just doesn't work out right.  for this page, i was adding water to my background and then ended up sticking the whole thing under the faucet.  my first reaction was to just toss the way too saturated paper, but then i added my color and watched it spread out across my paper to the corner.  and once it dried.....sigh...it was so pretty!!  

what about you??  do you love watercolors??  

xoxo