Our lovely friend Rachel celebrated her 30th birthday this week, and I wanted to make her a special card for the day. Ages ago, I got some gorgeous Inktense watercolour pencils from Derwent (we went to visit the pencil museum at Keswick, which was amazing!). I’m not very good at drawing or painting, but these pencils are really easy to use and you can control exactly where the colour goes. When you add the water to the pencil, it produced really vivid inky colours, and even I can manage to make things look vaguely good when drawing!

For Rachel’s card, I wanted to draw a big 30 on the front using as many of the bright colours as I could. I took some inspiration from a ring binder that I got a very long time ago – I actually bought it to go to music college to study for my A-levels, when I was 16! Almost 12 years on the folder is still going strong! 🙂 I like the way that the circles overlap and wanted to try to recreate that on the card.

I started by drawing circles of colour in the shape of the numbers – they aren’t touching at this point but are fairly close together.

When that was finished, I added the water. The best way to do this is to brush water over the circles randomly (rather than doing each one in turn around the numbers), as I found that the colours ran better this way.

And that’s it! All you have to do is wait for it to dry 🙂 You could make your own envelope while you wait – I found a suitably colourful one to match. The good thing about this style is that you can do pretty much anything with circles and colours, and the possibilities are endless!