Stamps are of course great adornments on almost any background, but you can also go the other way around: start with a stamped image on a white background, then coloring it in yourself – Including the background.

I started with a nice image of a rustic window, its shutters open, some vines and flowers growing around it. I stamped with black archival ink on a piece of sturdy matte-coated paper I had laying around and didn’t know any properties of – but thought, oh well, we’ll see, this will probably work at least somewhat (and it did 🙂 ).

I then took out my Distress ink Reinkers, put a couple of drops of each color in a Tim Holtz Ink Palette, and went to work with a watercolor brush pen.

I colored the entire surface, paying special attention to the window panes (how does one color glass…?)

When the ink was sufficiently dry, I covered each window with Glossy Accents, to give them a nice ‘window-like’ reflection.

To finish it off I die-cut a sentiment (Congrats) from rose gold (almost copper) metallic paper and attached it to the lower right corner.

All in all it was a nice, meditatively calm kind of project. The reinkers worked wonderfully as watercolors, and the ink palette came in handy. But note that you can’t really travel with the ink palette because the ink drops will not remain in their pans – which to me was a disappointment.