FMP: Castle and Roses

I wanted to do a similar design to my previous one that I had done on the computer, but this time by doing it by hand. I really like drawing lines with biro and then filling them in with watercolour and so my first idea was to do a castle with roses surrounding it.
The reason I am choosing watercolour is because I'm really inspired by the French illustrator Clément Lefèvre for the soft texture he brings to his drawings by using really light colours without strong contrasts between shadow and light. I had mentioned him here. I am also inspired by the illustrations from Dragonology for the same reasons. 

Here are my steps for each design:

Idea 1- Header
This idea originated from my previous design where I wanted to do vines climbing up the sides of the invitation, but this time I just wanted to do a little "header" design that would go at the top and the bottom of the page.

Idea 2 - Corner Border
This was another idea that I had in mind where I would place this at the corner of the page. I was hoping to do a more complex design at the top corner, and this led me onto the next design.

Idea 3 - Corner Border (Complete)
As I have mentioned above, this is a development of my previous design where I wanted to do something a bit more elaborate to be positioned at the top corner and bottom corner of the invitation.

I first started by drawing out the structure of the invitation so that I knew exactly how large my corner borders would be, and then worked on the castle. After that I roughly drew out all of the roses before going into more detail.
Once I was done drawing the top corner I worked on the bottom corner, and after all of that I inked the lines with black biro. I let the ink dry a little before rubbing out the pencil lines and then worked on thickening some of the lines to create depth.
After that I then coloured it in with watercolour pencils as they had a softer texture to them.

Idea 4 - Castle & Roses in Detail
At this point I was thinking of the other cards and that if I was going to use this theme of castle and roses, how I was going to do them.
So I thought that I'd do another design that would be both useful as a little header design and also a design that would be displayed on the back of a landscape card.

I had thought of just drawing the roses to create the little "line", but then decided to draw some behind the castle just to bring it out a bit more.

Conclusion:
I really do like this idea, although I really want to try out a design that's similar to the ones shown in Illuminated Manuscripts. I think that these designs really do work as a complete set though!