Twinkling Pinwheels (Hibiscus)

A Swap with ColourArte

A few weeks ago I received a personal message from a woman named Leslie on my Facebook Page asking where she could find my Water Droplet stamps. It was a few messages later that I realized that she was the owner of a company called ColourArte. To be honest, I didn't know much about their products. Only that I had seen the catchy name of one of their products online, "Twinkling H2Os".

I thought it was great that she'd contacted me in such a down to earth way and that she didn't flaunt who she was. We got talking and decided to do a product trade. Why not?! I'd never played with Twinkling H2Os and she wanted to try out my stamps. I couldn't wait to combine them with my designs. Especially the Hummingbirds, Moon Wings and Hibiscus stamps...

It's been a great experience so far! My Design Team and I received a generous amount of paints to experiment with. If you've never played with Twinkling H2Os they are basically watercolour paints with sparkle! Each colour arrived in a little lip gloss container. I've tried watercolour paints in tubes before but just couldn't find my groove with them. These are cakes. They come dry. Simply add water and the the pigment loosens up and becomes paint.

Some Unexpected Advice...

My boyfriend took a look at the paints and gave me a valuable piece of advice from his experience painting little figurines for table top gaming... He always painted metallics over a black base to accent the effect. Normal paints over a white base to brighten the colour.

To test his theory out I used black card stock as a base and embossed my Hibiscus stamp in black and gold. The embossed design created little walls which ended up holding the colour beautifully! I wanted to make sure that I got a thick layer of paint down so that the colour would show on the black base. The spaces between the linework acted like little troughs that held a lot of paint.

My father snatched this one before I could finish it as a card. Lol. He said it was done.

It's always hard to capture "sparkle" in photographs. Hope this close up shows the effect. I didn't mix colours for this experiment.

I used so many of their little paints in this that I'm not going to list all of them. So far all of the colours that I've used have shone beautifully! Here's a link to them. I want more... They're kind of addictive in those little lip gloss containers. The magpie in me wants to collect all of them. Lol. My boyfriend stopped me for now ;)

Well that's it for me for now. Thanks for stopping by!

Ryn