AECP - Creative Watercolor Media

In Altenew's Creative Watercolor Media class, Jennifer Rzasa, Laura Bassen, and Debby Hughes give lots of ideas about using your ink pads, ink refills, and shimmer sprays to watercolor on your cards.

Using ink pads and ink refills to watercolor has been around a long time in the stamping world but it is often a forgotten technique. This gives you more uses for you inks and you can get a great watercolor look without the expense of buying watercolor paints.

I started out my card by stamping a piece of Altenew Watercolor paper with Altenew Alluring Orchids using Versamark ink and then embossing the image with Altenew Antique Gold embossing powder.

Then using a wet-on-wet watercolor technique and Altenew Fresh Dye Ink refills I painted my image. With the wet-on-wet technique you start with wetting your paper with “clean” water and then use your brush drop on the inks and allow them to flow where the water takes them.

You can use your brush to push the inks around while they are wet to get darker and get lighter areas for shadows and highlights. Ink do stain the paper so you will only be able to lighten the image a small amount.

Supplies used:

Stamps – Altenew Alluring Orchids

Inks – Altenew Fresh Dye Inks – Frayed Leaf, Evergreen (Green Fields color family), Amethyst, Plum (Sugarplum color family), Citrus Burst, Maple Yellow (Pocketful of Sunshine color family)
Misc – Altenew Antique Gold embossing powder, Altenew Hot Press Watercolor paper, Silver Brush Black Velvet watercolor round brush #4, Simon Says Stamp Anti-Static powder

AECP - With A Twist

 

My cards for the Altenew Academy’s With a Twist class taught by Therese Calvird. Even though I have been a card maker for 17 years Therese gave a few ideas that I had never tried before. She gives instructions and ideas for layering stamps in different ways, using unusual color mixes, acetate, cutting the card front differently than just straight, mixing modern & vintage designs, and faux embossing.

For my cards I decided to do partial die cutting for the cut oddly and the faux embossing technique.

Card 1:

Was done using the cut oddly technique. I did partial die cutting using the coordinating die for Altenew’s In the Woodlands stamp set and after deciding where I wanted it to cut, I lined up the top cutting plate on my Spellbinders Platinum just to where I wanted the cut to stop and ran the card front through my machine. I was then able to line up the stamp to the cut and use Altenew Jet Black ink to stamp the outline. Once the image was stamped on the card front, I used the layering stencils to color in the image using Altenew Fresh Dye inks.

Products Used:
Stamps – Altenew In the Woodlands, Altenew Classic Greetings
Inks – Altenew Fresh Dye Inks in Jet Black, Pale Mauve, Amethyst, Firefly, Grass Field, Shadow Creek

Card 2:

Was done created using the faux embossing technique. Therese used an alphabet die set to cut the word she used for her card. I decided to be lazy and use one of the many word dies that I have in my collection.

For this I die cut the Altenew Waterbrush Hello die six times to cover the card front, then using Bearly Arts liquid glue I glued each of the words to the card front. Once they were dry, I used scissors to trim off any overhanging pieces. 

The butterfly was stamped using Altenew Jet Black Fresh Dye Ink and then I used Taylored Expressions Honey ink to layer the stamps. After the butterfly was die cut using the coordinating die, I popped it up on the card front with foam.

Products Used:
Stamps – Altenew Dovetail Butterflies
Dies – Altenew Waterbrush Hello
Inks – Altenew Fresh Dye Inks in Jet Black, Taylored Expressions Honey