Tuesday Tutorial | Pinspired Watercolor Layout - Color Me Happy.

Good morning my beautiful readers! Today I have a super fun layout tutorial for you.

It was inspired by this amazing watercolor photo backdrop I stumbled across on Pinterest.

The photo and brilliant idea comes from Amy and Naomi over at the Oh Happy Day blog. They have written a really good tutorial using tube watercolours and rulers. My methods are significantly less precise, but it gets the job done. You can obviously choose which one works best for you.

Okay so to start you'll have to get yourself 2 sheets of white cardstock. One will be the background that you mount everything too, The other your going to cut in to many, many 2 inch squares (36).

Next comes the painting of the squares. There were 7 colors in my paint pallet that I wanted to use, so having done the math, I divided my squares in to piles of 5 plus 1 extra that I painted purple. I lay each set of 5, Painted the middle square the straight up pallet colour and then worked to create a slight gradient by mixing in the follow on paint color for the 2 squares either side. So if I was doing the yellow squares - the centre square would just be straight up yellow, the 2 squares to the left would have yellow with progressively more orange paint added. The 2 right squares would have progressively more green added. My gradient was fairly small, but you can make yours as large as you like. Oh and a note on painting - I found the more haphazard the better. I didn't even bother wetting my cardstock first.

Once done, you can lay them out to dry.

A smart person at this point might consider weighing the dry squares down under their craft mat stacked with cookbooks to make them a little more flat, but I wouldn't know anything about that. I just moved straight on to the next step.

Once dry, I lay the pieces out on my background to decide the order in which I wanted to stick them down.

Once happy with your order, take your squares off one by one, numbering the back as you go. This will make life so much easier when it comes to putting them back on.

Glueing the squares down is another personal preference. I choose to use backed tape. I covered the entire background in stripes about an inch apart. Then only peeled off the backing as I was working on that row (following your numbers of course). This make the process very clean and easy. I did however have to use my fine line craft glue to stick down a few corners when finished. Once again, a more patient and intelligent person might choose to give the layout a couple of hours under weights. I didn't.

As far as placement is concerned, I chiefly concentrated on making the intersections line up more than the edges. Once all the squares were down I cleaned up the edges with the paper trimmer. Here is the final product:

 I know all you creative souls out there don't really need any further instruction on how to turn it in to a layout. So I'll just give you the briefest account of how it came together for me. I found a photo with a lot of white works best. This one of Eva in her favourite loud print PJ's was perfect, but a black and white photo would do just as well. I didn't feel the need to mat the photo as I didn't really want to add more patterns. I did however embellish fairly heavenly from the Main and Embellishment Kits. I tried to keep the coloured embellishments close to their matching background quarter for uniformity, but that's a personal choice thing as well. So here's the final product.

Now I'm going to put it under some cookbooks for a couple of days ;)

Aimee Xx