Watercolored Sunflower (CAS August 2018 Challenge)

Good evening. Tomorrow is Friday..YAY. Even though I've been retired quite a few years, I still get happy when Friday is the next day. I guess it was ingrained in my consciousness for too many years :-)

I've been trying hard to get into this month's CAS Watercolor challenge, since it's sunflowers. Have a lot of those images (but when I went hunting in the flower stamp drawers, I wasn't finding as many as I thought I remembered having!!!)  I was looking for something that would be easy to watercolor, since that's a bit of a challenge to me. Finally settled on a clear stamp that probably was from the Michael's Dollar bin. I knew I was going to stamp on w/color paper, and  with that texture - it needs to be restamped multiple times, so I wanted a clear image I could keep reinking. Now please don't ya'll laugh at this card-----

used Distress markers in shades of yellow to ink up this stamp, and can't even remember how many times I kept reinking, restamping. The outline part shows up as though I'd outlined it, but that was the Rusty Hinge marker that showed up nicely here. I also had some of the Mustard Seed and Lemonade inked on the edges of this outline stamp. Then used a waterbrush to try to pull out the colors...that worked fairly well. Wanted a bit more shading, so scribbled the Mustard Seed on the kraft mat, and used the brush to add some more layers around on the petals. Center was done with adding a little Spiced Marmalade first, then using Tea Dye, Brushed Corduroy, and just going to darker browns until I got something that looked like the brown center of a sunflower to me.

Now here's where I said Don't Laugh! This was just a single flower...so I free handed the stem and leaves with the water brush. That little blossom just looked too lonely all by itself.

Mat was colored with brusho greens and yellows, also on watercolor weight paper. For some reason, it didn't want to spread well so that's why so many of the specks still show in the colors. The c/s was quite wet, but the crystals just didn't want to spread around even though I kept spritzing with water, finally with a gold spray. Decided I liked it anyway behind the sunflower and cut it with a S/B Wonky die.  The sunflower looks like it's on white paper, but it was cream colored..the card base is also cream color, and IRL these 'creams' look the same color.

OK, off to link up with the CAS August Watercolor (AW, heck, go ahead and laugh if you want! I'm still trying to get the hang of watercolor). Skating in by the skin of my teeth----

Ya'll have a nice evening. Thanks for joining me & maybe see ya again tomorrow if I can finish a card tonight. Trying to sneak in the 2fer also! Big hugs.