The Snowflake Cards – Watercolour, Die Cutting, Masking and Salt Technique (oh my!)

I had such fun making these cards – a little bit of mess and I got paint all over my jumper and didn’t even realise so that’s currently soaking since the jumper was pale grey and the paint was PINK – yikes!  Anyway, these cards are made by watercolouring over some masked off areas (snowflakes) and sprinkling salt on the wet paint to make interesting patterns, then brushed off when the paint is dry.  The photo below shows the four cards I ended up with and this is me trying to decide which diecut sentiments need to go on which cards.

So here’s what I did…

Start off by diecutting the snowflakes from contact paper.  The stuff I had was leftover from a bathroom project and has a beachy driftwood pattern on it.  Any kind of contact paper will work and any pattern – some kind of pattern is good as it will help you see it.  Peel the contact paper off its backing sheet and stick the snowflakes down on the watercolour card wherever you want them to go, and make sure they are stuck well as you don’t really want paint and water to seep underneath, but that can also be a look if that’s what you are going for.

Then wet your paper and start painting.  I am using my Altenew Watercolor 36 pan set for this, as it has some fantastic blues and teals and really nice purples and pink colours. Once you have finished painting, sprinkle salt on top wherever you want it to go and leave it to dry.

Here’s a close up of one of the teal pieces and you can see the contact paper snowflakes and the gritty pattern of the salt on top of the watercolour.

I love love love this teal colour paint. This is how it will look once it dries.

And this is how it will look after you peel off the contact paper snowflakes.   As you can see some of them have obviously not stuck down properly or couldn’t cope with the amount of water on the paper, but I actually love it like this.  It’s very natural and organic and a bit distressed.

After settling on the diecut placement, I glued them down on each card.

But actually before I did that, I did some additional stamping of some smaller snowflakes onto the card with white pigment ink.

I really love how this copper glitter cardstock goes with the minty green of the watercoloured card.

This one has not such a great photo, I don’t know what went wrong here but the glitter cardstock is silver though it looks kind of gold in this photo.  I love the Happy Holiday sentiment diecut though.

These two cards went to my mum (purple)  and my sister (blue) and you can see the card I used for the card bases above.  This was card I purchased locally in an actual shop, and it was nice to be able to select and purchase single sheets of card – quite a novelty!

I apologies for these two photos as I had to take them at night in order to get everything finished and the cards ready to post but the lighting is not great so the colours look off.  This jolly big sentiment is another from Concord and 9th and it’s so fun!  I stamped them with Versamark and then covered them with white embossing powder and heat set them.

And that’s the finished cards.

Supplies used FYI:

hot press watercolour card
Altenew Watercolor 36 pan set
Snow Flurry Stamp and Dies – Concord and 9th
Merry and Bright Die – Concord and 9th
Trim the Tree Stamp – Concord and 9th
Hero Arts Unicorn pigment ink
Silver, White and Copper glitter cardstock from stash
Copper Nuvo drops
Versamark ink
White Embossing Powder
cardstock from stash
Nuvo deluxe adhesive