Stampin’ Fancy Friday — Fern & Flora Watercolor

Hello Friends and welcome to a new Stampin’ Fancy Friday. Our June theme is “Inspired By Water.” We could interpret that to mean products with water themes or even watercoloring. As soon as I read “watercoloring,” I knew that was what I wanted to do since it’s my favorite coloring technique.

To see all the designers’ projects using this month’s theme, keep an eye on the Stampin’ Fancy Friday Facebook and Instagram pages. We’d also love to see any of your projects using our theme! Be sure to tag them with @stampinfancyfriday so we can find and admire them!

My card features the Fern & Floral Bundle with sentiments from the Sending Salutations Stamp Set. Pretty much everything on the card is watercolored. I started with the background using a sheet of Fluid 100 Watercolor Paper by painting a wash with Pretty Peacock, Lost Lagoon, and Golden Glow ink. As the ink dried, I added clear water splatter that lifted some of the color and added character to the plain wash.

For most of the ferns, I randomly pre-painted watercolor paper with lots of light and dark areas using Mossy Meadow, Old Olive and Peaceful Pine ink. After the paper dried, I die-cut the shapes from areas with lots of interest. This process ensures crisp embossing of the delicate die-cut designs. However, for the curled fern, I ended up going back and adding a little shading afterward with a very dry brush. I followed a similar process with the flowers by using the die as a general guide to figure out where to pre-paint the center areas. Then, I die-cut the centers from Berry Burst Cardstock.

To break up the colors, I also die-cut a few ferns from Basic White Cardstock.

For the middle fern, I heat embossed it in white on watercolor paper and then very carefully watercolored the individual leaves with Peaceful Pine ink.

For the butterflies, I stamped them with Basic Black Hybrid Ink on Fluid 100 Watercolor Paper and then watercolored them with Berry Burst and Blackberry Bliss ink.

The two sentiments are from the Sending Salutations Stamp Set. For the one on the card front, I fussy cut a portion of the sentiment so it simply said “Congratulations.”

I hope this card inspires you to give watercoloring a try. It’s fun and very forgiving technique, especially when using watercolor paper. Several people have told me they are intimidated to try, so my advice is to jump in and experiment and have fun!

Have a wonderful and creative day!

Purchase products from my online store to qualify to receive free exclusive project tutorials. This month’s PDF includes 12 tutorials designed by my demonstrator friends and I to inspire your paper crafting! The projects feature products from the May-August 2026 Catalog and current Online Exclusives. Enjoy!