Two new (to me) products

I placed an order last week with Dick Blick. I'd found a few products awhile ago that I thought would be cool to try out. I needed some new Lumiere colors for a swap I'm doing, so I figured since they were having 20% off an order of $100, there was no time like the present.

The two new products I grabbed were Yupo watercolor paper, which really isn't like a paper at all, and Derwent Inktense Pencils. The Yupo paper comes in pads, and it's a polypropylene, kind of like an almost plastic type of surface. It's translucent, kind of, but not quite in the same way that vellum is translucent, but they look similar. Very cool stuff. It says it's good for watercoloring. It sure is. I think it also is going to be pretty good for marker use.

The Derwent pencils bragged that they had the intensity of ink in a watercolor medium. They weren't kidding.

I tried it on my favorite image of a mum (from the Artful Inkables line at Starving Artistamps. I drew a thin line around the inner edges of the image, and it was too much color. I used watercolor paper, which soaked in all that intense color and ruined the image. I mean, it was INTENSE! Here's a picture of it. I took a real close up of the mum so you could see both how much color I laid down, and how deep the color was when I spread it around with a blender pen. Click on the picture and make it big. You'll see what I mean about how dark it is. I think it might have worked had I used black ink and not a dark blue, but as it is, the blue of the pencil covered up a lot of the detail of the stamp. Oh, and you know how with watercolors, if they dry and you rewet them, you can dilute the color more. With these pencils, once the water dries, they're permanent, so you can layer color on top of color. It's really a cool effect. I did it with a flower stamp that isn't finished yet. I put a yellow on top of a blue, and the effect is very interesting. It allows you to add depth you can't with regular watercolor pencils. Blender pens work wonderfully with these.

Now onto my challenge card. Not sure with sketch challenge number, but it's from yesterday, my Doodlebug's birthday. I thought it only fitting to do the challenge. And it was a really cool (and really easy) challenge.

The stamp is from Still Life Stems from SU! I stamped with Stazon Jet Black on the Yupo paper. I used the Derwent Inktense pencils to color the image. I used VERY little color. EEK! I found on the Yupo paper, you can NOT layer colors. You rewet the color and it wipes off, which was great because I could remove some color to add shaded areas. Clever, no? Actually, just a dumb mistake that I used to my advantage. I love the bling on this card. I finally found something to use it on!! Oh and that violet velvet ribbon. Yum. Again, click on the card for a close up of the Yupo paper and the intensity of the pencils. I used such a tiny amount of color on this image because I wanted it to be subtle to match the papers. I mean, wee little bit.

Now I'll just spam you with a bunch of pictures from last night. Well, not a bunch, but a few.

This one is Dylan covering his ears while we all sing Happy Birthday. Have I mentioned he is not a people person? He was very excited about his cake, but didn't want us to sing to him. Here's the cake - a bunch of cleverly arranged cupcakes.
Transformers, he loved it! But the icing could have been used to stamp with. It stained everything it touched.

Anyway, thanks for listening to me ramble.