Spellbinders Die D-Lites Sugar Skull and Hola Die set

Hello everyone.

I have a project using Spellbinders Die D-Lites today. I'm using the Sugar Skull set and the Hola set. The Sugar Skull is just as its name suggests, a skull that you can do so many different things to. I decided to watercolor with it today. The Hola set is a word die set with some of the most common Spanish words. The two sets pair well together and I'm using them today.

I started with two pieces of Ranger watercolor paper. I tape them down with Thermo Web Purple Tape to my black Epicurean board. This helps my watercolor paper from warping. It also allows me to use my heat tool easily when being impatient between layers.

Once my paper was secure, I used my Avery Elle Liquid Watercolors to water color the background and some additional matching panels for die-cutting. I used 6 of the 10 available colors. I dropped a few drops into my Ranger alcohol ink palette which also works great for watercolors. The colors were named Cherry, Mimosa, lemon Grass, Sea Glass, Sugar Plum, and Aquamarine.

I used a mix of wet on wet watercoloring and wet to dry watercoloring techniques on this project. Most of the background is wet on wet; which is where I would dampen the watercolor Cardstock with a good amount of water and then add my color with a wet brush straight from the palette. To finish off the background I also added watercolor straight from the palette to a completely dry background by flicking the watercolor on. This adds the most opaque color and I love the vibrant splatters.

After both panels were completely dry, I used the floral dies that come in the Spellbinders Sugar Skull die set to cut out all of the flowers that you see on the card. I also cut the Sugar Skull itself as well as the Amore word die from the Spellbinders Hola die set. I cut them from Ranger Stark White Simon Hurley cardstock four times each. I am able to cut many dies at once using the Spellbinders Platinum die cutting machine- which made things so much easier!

Using the Spellbinders Tool in One, I punched out the negative pieces of the very detailed Sugar Skull, but I didn't punch them all out. I wanted to keep the teeth and some of the facial structure to keep the stark whiteness of the skull. In the end, I may or may not agree with this decision. Part of me wishes that I could see more of the watercoloring behind it but I also really like how it turned out. I adhered all of the layers together using Nuvo Deluxe adhesive for both the Sugar Skull and the Amor word die.

I used Tombow Extreme Clear Adhesive tabs to stick the Sugar Skull and the Amor word die to the background panel. The background measures slightly less than 3 1/2 by 4 3/4 because I messed up and missed the proper cut... But it still looked good enough to use the panel.

All of the die cut flowers were adhered using various clear adhesive. Either the same Tombow Extreme Tabs or Micro Glue Dots and even some Nuvo Deluxe adhesive. I did this to give the flowers varying dimension on the card. I wanted flowers to appear to be coming out of the skull and wrapping around it almost like a crown.

I hope you enjoyed my project today. A complete list of supplies are listed below.

Thank you,

Koren