Hi all and welcome to another week on the Simon Says Stamp Wednesday Challenge

Thank you for joining us for the Make Your Own Background Challenge and we hope you will all join us again this week too.

We will be back soon with the name of the lucky winner of the $50 Voucher

This week the challenge is

CLEAN AND SIMPLE

As always Simon Says Stamp will be giving away $50 voucher to shop at the fabulous Simon Says Stamp Store

I recently picked up the Hero Arts Stamp Your Own Cactus stamp set and couldn’t wait to play!  I love the images and little cacti arrangements seem to be everywhere right now!  At the moment I’m pretty obsessed with Spectrum Noir Aqua Markers.  I have just added to my collection with a third set, the Florals one.  To colour my image on today’s card I used pens from the Primaries and Essentials sets.

I started by stamping the first cactus (the larger one) in India black Versafine ink (a great ink for using with watercolour techniques) onto water colour card and then masked it and stamped the round cactus as well as the pots.  I coloured the images in using the pens as water colours (scribbling on a mat then adding water and painting with a brush).  I added a very diluted wash of the aqua colour around the image and a grey wash for the shadow.  Although you can’t see it, there is a little Wink of Stella on the cacti too – well why not?!