Watercoloring the MFT Floral Fantasy

Watercolor is a technique I love, but it's a challenging technique that I'm always learning.  The only thing I know for sure is no matter how many times you work with watercolor you will never get the exact same results twice.

I used the same technique for this Floral Fantasy card that I did when creating the peonies in the Technique Tried - Watercoloring Floral Focal Point post.  What I learned while watercoloring this image was that adding shading was a bit more challenging.  This image has a lot of details drawn in by the illustrator.  By heat embossing the image, I created a lot more nooks and crannies to paint.  I feel like this image will lend itself to coloring more easily without the heat embossing.

The end result made for a pretty card, but I wouldn't use this technique with this image again.  In the future, I would stamp and color with watercolor or Copics, or I would heat emboss it in a metallic for a clean and simple elegant effect.  The takeaway I wanted to share with this post is that not all things come out the way we see them in our heads, but we should always try the idea and learn from it.