One thing that makes me really happy is color -- rich, vibrant color. So when I finally got a chance to play with the new Brea Reese watercolor inks, I was down-right joyful. We have these in stock at NOCO Crop Stop if you want to give them a try yourself, both the watercolor ink and the ultra shimmery glitter ink. I used some of both for this project, although the camera doesn't do the glitter ink justice. The Brea Reese youtube channel has some great video's for beginners, showing how to use these inks. I put a couple drops of some of the colors into a ceramic pallet, then just used them like regular watercolors. First I loosely drew flowers in water with a watercolor brush, and then I dropped color into the water on the paper and let it do its thing. I used mixed-media paper, just to see how the water and color would take. I loved my end results, but I am going to try watercolor paper next.

After I let the inks dry, I doodled over them with a black Sharpie fine-liner pen. Sharpie works well if you're going to be using wet mediums because Sharpie ink is waterproof once dry and it won't smear or reconstitute.

I added some random highlights with a white Uniball Signo broad gel pen, and added a "Be Blessed" quote using the Tim Holtz Ideology Chit Chat stickers. I drew around the quote with the Sharpie. The colors are gorgeous, but the sharpie and white highlights pull it all together.

I really adore parts of this piece over others, and can see myself using parts of it in different ways. See how lovely this cropped section looks:

I was so inspired by the cropped sections of this piece that I decided to use the painting as a base for the Day 2 prompt, World Day of Prayer. You can see that blog post right before this one.

I hope you are able to take some time for yourself today to be creative. If you are, please remember to share your work and tag it #artfulmarch and #freeheartart.

And I truly do want you to be happy!

<3 Mindy