Soft Watercolour Sympathy Card

These are the cards one never wants to have to make, especially if they are for someone close to us. But these cards, I’ve been told, bring a ray of light to that grieving person. This one is for a young mother who lost her only child and I made it with a lot of love, from the heart of a mother to another. 

My idea was to give some colour to this card, I wanted to avoid being too rigid, I didn’t want to use dark colours, no grays and definitely no black. So I reached for my Kuretake Zig Clean Color Real Brush markers to do this easy and soft technique. I started by stamping and white heat embossing my images around a 5 ½ X 4 ¼ piece of watercolour cardstock. This is a corner stamp, so I stamped one side, embossed it, then masked it and stamped the opposite side and repeated the embossing process. 

Using only 036, 031 blues for the flowers and 041 green for the leaves, I freely added a few strokes directly from the marker to the paper on each of the elements of the design, there is no need to be too careful here, because the idea is a relaxed look. Then, once all the parts I wanted with colour had some of it, with a small spray bottle, I sprayed water directly to the areas I had added the colours and let the water move and mix a bit on the paper. Using a paper towel, I carefully removed the excess water. 

It’s almost like magic and because Zig markers are fairly translucent, once I added the water the colour became even lighter, giving this delicate, almost barely there finish. You, of course, can add as much colour as you want and use different shades that can make a design more vibrant. 

I trimmed off the edges of the panel and used foam tape to adhere it to a 5 ½ X 4 ¼  piece of textured white cardstock I had previously cut using a stitched edge rectangle die cut. Because I was so happy with the results of the watercolouring, I didn’t want to take the focus from it, so I stamped the sentiment “pensando en ti” which is Spanish for “thinking of you” on a thin strip of vellum and again heat embossed it in white, it’s subtle and hard to see in the picture but it’s definitely there. Given the purpose of the card, I wanted to add embellishments but nothing too flashy, so I added a few white pearls which complemented beautifully with the theme. 

This card went overseas and I have not heard from the recipient yet, but I really hope she feels the warmth and love we are sending her from our side of the world. 

“It is not what we do but how much love we put into it” St. Mother Teresa of Calcutta