Jan's Creative Corner: Watercoloured Simply Beautiful for JAI #780

Friday, 27 February 2026

Watercoloured Simply Beautiful for JAI #780

Happy Friday and welcome to you! We've finally had some rain in Melbourne - almost the only rain so far this year - this week and the grasses and lawns are lapping up the welcome water and the producing a little green grass at last. The flowers and trees in my garden are also looking so much healthier.

This week at Just Add Ink is another of our now standard and rotating challenges: Just Add Stencils, Dies or both. You have until 7pm on Wednesday 11 February to join with us for this fun challenge. Our design team have used all sorts of themes of dies and stencils in our projects this week and you can too! We'd love to see what you have in your stash and what you love to create with.

My card features lots of dies this week. The obvious ones are the Simply Beautiful dies that are used to cut these gorgeous floral images and the main flower centre.

But the background pieces - the Arches - its an arch with a removable frame and the Leaf EF came as part of the Starter Kit bundle of products from Sizzix when I bought a new Big Shot recently. I used some adhesive to keep the fine frame attached to it's centre.

For this card design, I was inspired by Tami Hewlett who is one of my favourite SU Artisans as water colouring has long been my favourite way to add colour to projects and she is such a master of this technique. Blends and Copics are great, but there is something special about the way water will add something unique every time by the way it moves over the paper.

I love adding a light layer of colour first - here I used Pretty in Pink - and then, as it is drying, I'll go in often with another layer of the same colour, but here added some Melon Mambo to add a little extra depth of colour to the petals. For the leaves, I've used Granny Apple Green with a tiny touch of Garden Green.

The images and sentiment are embossed in gold to add a little something special. The sentiment is from the January SU Stamp of the Month called Fabulous Sayings. The set has a delightful array of sentiments in both a handwritten and typeface and will be something I will use often.

These sentiments don't have dies so a quick and easy way to cut out a sentiment is to trace around it with a pencil, stamp inside this outline and then fussy cut using the pencil line. I did this but trimmed some of the space down as I didn't want to cover up too much of the water colouring.

Once the flowers and leaves were all added a gold Wink of Stella pen was used to flick some gold ink over all the images and a little of the white background too.