Creating Pale Pastels with Hero Arts Liquid Watercolors

Hi there! Emily Midgett here with you today to share some super pale pastel inspiration created with the ultra-concentrated and vibrant Hero Arts Liquid Watercolors! With such concentrated watercolors in primary shades, it's really easy to find yourself creating vibrant, saturated projects, so I wanted to challenge myself to create some pale pastel colors for a unique feel. Let's get started with the details!

I began by silver embossing a few images from the Ornate Carousel stamp set onto watercolor paper. I then did some mixing and matching with the Hero Arts Liquid Watercolors in shades of Purple, Strawberry, Pink, Orange, Leaf, Dark Teal, Indigo and Pewter, liberally adding drops of iridescent shimmer watercolor (from one of the previous My Monthly Hero kits) and several drops of clean water to create super diluted, pale, shimmery colors. I used a watercolor technique called glazing to create custom shades, adding a thin, diluted layer of color over another color that had already dried to create a unique color.

I also created my background by taping down an A2 panel of watercolor paper to my watercolor board, saturating my paper with water, then dropping the same diluted colors onto the wet watercolor paper. I tried to use colors that would blend well together; for example, I avoided mixing green and purple to create an unpleasant shade of brown, instead focusing on mixing the blue, purple, and red shades on my palette. I used my heat tool to speed the drying process, then added another layer of diluted color, swirling the drops of pale color around with my very wet paintbrush to create an even paler, ethereal backdrop. After the background was dry, I used my paintbrush to flick some Pewter droplets in the bottom corner to add an artistic flair and some additional texture.

After I'd finished my watercoloring, I used the coordinating dies to die cut the carousel images out. I also die cut some shimmery bunting using the Decorative Edge Fancy Die and some of the beautiful shimmery vellum from the DIY Ornament Kit. I die cut the large Happy from white card stock and heat embossed the greeting from Ornate Carousel on strips of white card stock using silver embossing powder. I added all of the die cuts and the greeting to the card front, adhering them using both liquid and foam adhesive for lots of texture and dimension.