 Hey stampers! Welcome to another week of Watch It Weekly Wednesday. I'm Aubrey, part of the Stampin' Jill Creative Team. Today I'm excited to share with you a technique that I love to do. If you know me, you know I love watercoloring or really any type of coloring, but today I want to show you a really fun watercolor technique. I like to call it the Boca watercolor technique. This is what it looks like. If you've seen different artwork that has different kind of watermarks like this, that's called the Boca effect. I came up with this idea to make this Boca effect using our Stampin' Up supplies. For this I have a piece of watercolor paper. This is cut to five by three and a half. It's actually just a half sheet of our regular size watercolor paper. I also am using water painters. I'll use two of the different sizes for this, the biggest and the smallest. And then some re-inkers. I'm using Gorgeous Grape, Highland Heather, Azure Afternoon, and Coastal Cabana. And then I'm also using our silicone mat. Okay, so let's get started. I'm going to start by putting just a drop of each of my re-inkers on my silicone mat. So I'll just do one in each corner. And then I'm going to take my one of my water painters and I'm just going to drop the water out of the brush just right into my ink. And I'm going to do three to four drops of water just like that. Okay, now on your dry watercolor paper you're going to want to just give that a brush of water. So I'm going to use my thick brush. This is really great for this part. And I'm just going to put water all over this watercolor paper. Oh, and you can see I have some color left in that, but it's okay. You'll see why. And I'm just going to go back and forth across my entire piece. And with this technique, at least at this point in the process, you can't have too much water. More water. That's generally the consensus. So I'm going to start by grabbing a color. I'm going to start with my dark blue. And I'm just going to pick some of that up, making sure I have a really wet brush. And I'm just going to drop it onto my watercolor paper. And if your watercolor paper is wet enough, it will kind of run and disperse like that. Okay, that's what you want it to look like. And then I'm going to grab some of my coastal cabana, that light blue color. Put some of that on there. And again, just kind of let it run. Maybe I'll get a little bit more of my darker blue, that azure afternoon. Okay. And then I'm going to come to my dark purple. This is the gorgeous grape. And I'm going to put some of that in this corner. Wash that around. And then a little more in this corner, just like that. And let the colors kind of run together too. That's okay. And then I'll take my last color, the Highland Heather. And I'm just going to drop some of that up in this corner, just like that. Okay. And then you can always come back in like, I want this blue to be a little bit darker. So you can always come back in and add more color. That kind of had some purple in it still. But I'm okay with the colors kind of running together, because I like that kind of ombre look that it gives it. Or maybe you want some more coastal cabana in there. Now, watercolor, this is going to dry lighter than what it's going to show here. And watercolor always looks different and better after it's dry. Okay, so I'm going to set this aside and let it dry because cameras are magical. I already have one done here that I'll just pull in. And this is what I'm going to show you my technique on. So in order to make the bokeh look, meaning those little watermarks, I'm going to use two circle dies. I'm using these ones from the Reach for the Stars dies from the annual catalog. It has all these different sizes of circles. And I'm just going to use the two smallest ones. You can use any basic shape for this. So you can use hearts, squares, circles, stars would be super cute, any basic shape that you can get from your dies. So I'm going to just start with the bigger of my two dies. And using my smallest water painter brush, I'm going to just fill in that circle. So I'm just going to stick it right on my watercolor paper. Now I did this one just right before I started the video. You don't want your watercolor background that you've made to sit for too long before doing this part, because you don't want that water to completely have dried into the paper. So this is still, I would say like damp to the touch, but dry enough that I'm not going to be like smearing it. You'll see what I'm saying. So we're basically just going to use water for this part. And we're just going to color in that inside that circle, trying to just stay right within the bounds of the die. And you can see it's going to pick up some of that purple color and bring it to the blue and just kind of mix it all around. And the cool thing about this, once I pull this up, you can see that circle starting to form. The cool thing is that once it dries completely, it will poke out even more. You'll be able to see the color even more. So then we're just going to do that kind of all over that watercolor piece like this. And you can overlap them. If you do want to overlap wait until your first circle dries most of the way. I'll show you that in just a second. I really like to do it in places where the colors kind of come together because then you're pulling the purple into the blue and the blue into the purple and it just makes it look really cool. And then if you go on to a color that's a little bit lighter, the darker colors pull much better than the lighter colors. So you could always take a little bit, just a little bit of this darker purple and do that inside of the circle. And then it's going to still do that circle look for you on the lighter colors. It'll just be a little darker. So you can do that with the blue too here. We'll just take just a tiny amount of color. And again make sure you have enough water. Okay, and then you can take the smaller circle too and come and do, see if I can keep that one circular with that much water. All right, another smaller one just like that. And then if you do want to come and do another circle connected to the one you've already done, after that's mostly dry, you can come and kind of overlap them. And it looks really, really cool to do that too. Okay, super cool. So let me bring in one that I have finished. So this one's done and completely dry. I want to show you how to do the saying on watercolor paper. Now watercolor paper is super porous. So when you stamp on top of it, a lot of time it won't give you a big nice crisp image. So I'm using the stamp set Softly Said and this Thinking of You. And I'm just going to do that right in the center of my watercolor image. And I'm using Memento Ink. You can use any black here, but this is my favorite black. And I'm just going to stamp that right in the center. And I know that it's not going to be a very dark image because that's just what happens with watercolor paper. So I'm going to take, and this is a little bit tedious, but I'm going to take a Stampin' Right marker. This is just a water-based black marker. And I'm just going to outline that stamp. And then with the other side, I can color it in just like that. And let me show you that finished cardigan there. And it looks almost like I hand lettered that, but I stamped it so I don't have to be talented at hand lettering. And it's just beautiful on that watercolor background. And I love the Boca effect that it has. Let me show you a few other cards that I've made using this same effect. Here's one I did with neutral colors. I thought this was really cool. It kind of looks like that tea-stained look that people do. I thought that was kind of fun. And then this one I did using hearts dice. So you can see the hearts in the background instead of circles. Super fun. I'm going to be teaching a virtual class on multiple watercolor techniques next month on Saturday, February 17th at 10 a.m. Mountain Standard Time. If you are interested in joining me for that, we'll be doing this technique and others. And it will be so much fun. The class is completely free. If you're interested in joining us for that class, make sure to click the link below to put your information in and we'll get you all the things that you need to do that class. If you have any questions, make sure to email us at sudemonstrator.com. We'd love to see you there. See you next time for another Watch It Weekly Wednesday.