Coloring Stencils Two Ways with SSS Rest and Refresh Release

Hi everyone!  Have you seen the new Rest & Refresh release from Simon Says Stamp?  It was just released today, and if you love nautical, this is the release for you.  The folks at Simon sent me the new Buoys stencil to play with.  Today I'm going to show you two ways to color with stencils.

For this first look, I cut a panel of watercolor cardstock and then used regular embossing paste over the stencil.  Once the paste was dry, I carefully painted the paste with watercolors.  The nice thing about watercoloring embossing paste is that it behaves a lot like watercolor paper, so if you use a color you don't like, or make something too dark, you can easily dab paint away/remove paint.

I finished the panel off with a punny sentiment created using Neat & Tangled's Journaling Alpha Dies and a sentiment from the N&T's Celebrate stamp set.  The Alpha dies were cut twice and adhered together so that they had a little bit more substance to them, and then I cut the tiniest slivers of foam tape so they could be popped up over the card.

For this next card, I colored the stencil using a no-line coloring technique.  I've colored with stencils before where I traced the stencil spaces like in this card (and before you go over to that post, let me just say that sometimes I cringe at my old photos because they are so dark).  But for this card, I figured out a much easier way to trace the stencil, and that is to ink it with a very very light color.  I took a quick snapshot with my phone so you can see what this looked like (forgive the very dim photo).

I used a ton of Copics on this card, but basically I had several different color trios that I then used randomly to color the different buoys.  This took A LOT of time to color, but I think that the results are definitely worth it.

For the sentiment, I again used the Journaling Alpha dies and then a sentiment from N&T's Typed Sentiments set on one of the Skinny Strips dies.

So there you have two very different ways to color with stencils.  I hope you'll give these techniques a try!  

And be sure to stop by Simon Says Stamp to check out the new release!