Three Cards with Technique Tuesday's Lovely Lavender Set

My mom's favorite color is purple, and she really loves lavender, so I was really happy to see Technique Tuesday's latest Greenhouse Society set, Lovely Lavender.  The set has an image of a bundle of lavender and also several really great sentiments.

My first two cards use a watercolor 'cheat' technique.

Stamping with my MISTI, I colored the image with several shades of distress markers in the purple family (Shaded Lilac, Seedless Preserves, Dusty Concord, and Picked Raspberry). Then I 'watercolored' by wetting the stamped image with a waterbrush and kind of spreading/mixing the color.

The same thing was done to the stems using a couple of greens (Cracked Pistachio and Forest Moss).

The waterbrush actually provided me with a little less control than I anticipated, I had a hard time controlling the amount of water and so it ended up being a little more blobby than I wanted (very technical term). 

To add some of that definition back in, I repeated the process - coloring the image with markers and stamping it until I was happy with the result.

Then I stamped the sentiment with Versafine, and added a couple mats and stitching to complete the look.

I wanted to see if I could get a better result using just a regular paint brush, so I repeated the process on a second panel using a paint brush instead of a waterbrush.

It was a little bit better, but not a ton.  I thought for this one I would change things up and instead of stamping over top with the distress markers again, I used Versafine.

This time I opted for some slightly offset mats to finish things off.

For my last card, I decided to color outside the lines.  Literally.

The image was randomly stamped on a panel, and then I colored around it using my B99 Copic marker.  This was a little tricky as there are some very tight spaces in the image, but I only sliped a couple times and a strategically placed sentiment covers the worst of it.

I love this look - it reminds me of fabric, and I wanted the pattern to be the star, so I kept the sentiment simple adding just a thin strip of cardstock to ground it.

That's all for me today.  Would love to know which of the three you like best!