Stampin' Up Bokeh technique |

This week was my week of classes here at my craft room. Here are a couple of cards that we did on Technique Tuesday. I have seen lots of these style of cards across the internet recently and was really keen to give it a try. I’ve drawn inspiration from a whole range of ideas and colour combinations I’ve seen to come with something of my own. It really is a very striking technique and comes from a lighting effect used in Photography – the only drawback is the drying time, so we filled the middle section of our class with a quick and easy card to allow the cards some extra drying time.

Here is one of our cards…

You firstly spritz watercolour paper with water and then with an aqua-painter and paint on your chosen colours.To draw the ink out of the ink pad, I simply squeezed the closed ink pad and this brings a little bit of the ink onto the kid – this is then my ‘palette’.

In this card, I used Perfect Plum and Crisp Cantaloupe. Depending on how your chosen colours co-ordinate, you can blend them in together or not – you don’t want to end up with a muddy colour, but these two colours blended together quite nicely. Let your paper dry before moving on to the next stage.

I punched out a template with some circle punches or you could use your circle framelits. I then used a sponge dauber and my White craft ink to colour in some circles directly on top of your painted watercolour paper. The effect is even more striking when you overlap some of the circles. The smaller circles are just made with the sponge dauber itself. Don’t be afraid to use a lot of white ink as it is much lighter when it dries, you can even go over your circles a second time once it is dry – though the ink does take an age to dry! You can speed up the process by using your heat gun but it does need to be totally dry before you stamp on it. I used the free SAB set Best Day Ever to stamp with (this set is one of the totally FREE sets you can earn with a purchase of £45 read all about it here) and added the hearts from the same set and also a few left-over sequins from my All is Calm frosted sequins kit – though our jewel rhinestones would work just as well.

This was made exactly the same way but using Real Red, Blushing Bride and Smoky Slate. For the sake of my class and waiting on cards to dry, we didn’t stamp on this one and just used the sweetheart punch and the Hello You Thinlits to add a little embellishment. I also used the Sweetheart punch and the little heart punch from the Itty Bitty Accents Punch in my template to make this card double up as a Valentine’s card.

So are you going to dust off your watercolour paper and give this one a try?

Here are all the supplies used in today’s cards: