Altenew Educator - Creative Watercolor Media

Hello everyone!  I am back today with a new project for another class in my Altenew Educator Certification Program , "Creative Watercolor Techniques".  A lot of the class was focused on using inks or reinkers in various ways to watercolor.

It took a few tries before I had a project that I was happy with and wanted to use to make a card.  This class was taught by Jen Rzasa, Laura Bassen and Debby Hughes, but I cannot stress enough that each person has to find their method that works for them.  All three ladies have beautiful projects.  I really struggle with the blending of colors and not having everything turn brown.  I am impatient and this is one technique that you have to make yourself slow down for.  I think I have nailed down my particular issue and that I am not using the right undertone when working with greens.  In my project, I think it would have been much more successful had I chosen a green with more of a yellow undertone.  That is why it's important to keep practicing if you want to do the Wet on Wet Technique which is what I was going for.  It just occurred to me that I should have used better watercolor paper for this and that's probably my issue, so I will try again another time.  I might stamp another panel while I still have the stuff out.  I was going for a more emboss resist type of background but I could die cut the blooms and most of the leaves out of the panel which is what I did to salvage this card.

I love how the flower blended using Summer Sunrise with Ruby Red to get a vivid coral color for my bloom.  The leaves just turned a muddy brown from the areas that the red reinker moved into with water.  So I used Evergreen reinker to just make them mostly a solid color of green.  As I said, I still need lots of practice with all my watercolor mediums.  I had one of my alcohol inked backgrounds that I had previously made that has shades of purples, pinks and a little coral so when I put that behind the flower, I thought it really came to life.  The images and sentiment are all heat embossed with Antique Gold Embossing Powder and I used a scrap of Gina K Designs Plum Punch cardstock for the sentiment banner.  The banners are die cut with one of the dies from "Keep It Simple Frames" from Papertrey Ink.

My husband really likes the bold vivid colors in this card.  With the blooms, even though I had two of them, One was definitely more the color and look that I was going for, so I just stacked the two on top of each other to make the bloom thicker.

In order to put this in the mail I will need to either trim off the excess or use a larger envelope.  I like to leave the card the way it is until I choose who to send it to and then make my choice based on available supplies.  I try to always have some padded mailers around in addition to regular A2 Envelopes.

This particular background did not take much foiling when I ran it through the Minc but I felt the colors worked out perfectly.  Once I am finished with the AECP, I really want to keep working on my techniques with Wet on Wet Water coloring.  That takes time though which for me is a rare commodity around here right now.

Now that I've said it out loud, I think the main reason I really struggled with this is that I should have used some of my good watercolor paper because the Bristol just can't take the amount of water used.  Bristol is great if you want to use your Zig Clean Color Real Brush Makers but not so much for this type of watercolor. I am going to repeat this particular project sometime this week and if I get better results, I will be sure to share them with you .  Duh... (smacks self in the head here).

Thanks so much for stopping by today to check out my project.  Affiliate links are used wherever possible to help support this blog.

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