Creativity is often just giving yourself permission to try something and perhaps fail.  And sometimes we do fail.  And sometimes, we don't!  I feel like the failures make the successes all the sweeter! 

I've never been very adept at using watercolors.  I've painted before, but not a lot on my scrapbook pages.  I've painted landscapes with oils and used acrylics on mixed media pieces... but almost always stuck basically to paper on my scrapbook pages.  It's just that I've seen so many striking pages with watercolor backgrounds that I just had to try it for myself. 

I selected a couple of blues and greens and applied them to my watercolor paper with a light hand and a very wet brush.  Dried the paper with my heat gun (patience when scrapping is not one of my virtues) and then splattered some more green and blue paint on top of the dried background.  So far, so good.  Now, I wanted to be careful not to overwhelm the softness of the background with too many other colors or strong patterns, so I picked just a few papers that repeated the colors in the photo to do my layering with.  

Added a couple of buttons and a chipboard piece from a partial pack of My Mind's Eye embellishments, the "be amazing," "always,"  and "crazy good" stickers are from Heidi Swapp.  But what I really love, love, love are the sewn-embellishment-mini-banner things from Crate Paper (top right corner, then the layered banner at the left side, and the camera and the half-circle kind of in the middle of the page pointing toward the photo).  Maybe I'm  so smitten with them because I don't have a working sewing machine right now (and of course what do I want--to have sewing on my layouts; we always want what we think we cannot have, right?).  But whatever the reason, I do love them.  I hope they continue making them for upcoming collections, cuz I want more, please.   

Since I used watercolor paper and it's not 12x12, I adhered the page to a green print paper (Crate Paper Birthday collection), did my journaling and called it done. 

The photo was taken on Mother's Day this year--- and a larger version of it was part of my Mother's Day gift, framed.  That and some framed artwork from the little ones are  hung on the wall in my entry way.   Couldn't have gotten a better gift! 

And now I am even happy with my watercolor attempt.  Double good! 

have a scrappy good day,
Cheryl

P.S.  The patterned paper is still from the scrap bin---it was one of the several sorted and clipped little packets I saved before the rest went to the recycle bin.