What a fun Blog Hop title. I can’t wait to visit all the other educators to see what their “Secret Card Recipe” is. Mine is watercolor. I love to watercolor, even though I’m not an expert. Check out Jaycee or Erum for their hints and tricks on painting with watercolors. I aspire to be as good as they are. I have found that even with little to no skill I can achieve a nice looking card. And, watercolors can make wonderful backgrounds. That’s the first card I want to share with you today, a fun and bright watercolored background.

I used Altenew’s Artists’ Watercolor 24 Pan Set and their Metallic Watercolor 14 Pan Set to achieve this galaxy like background. I wish you could see this card in real life the gold watercolor really shines! This background was easy to create. I used Altenew’s Watercolor Paper Set (A2 loose sheets) and did a water wash over the entire piece of paper. Sometimes I also completely wet the back of the paper too, as this helps prevent the paper from warping. Then, I chose purples, blues and reds, and a little black watercolor. With a wet brush, full of paint, I added color in splashes on the wet page and let the colors mix. While the paint was still wet, I added splotches of gold here and there. Once it was dry, I used white acrylic paint and silver watercolor and spattered the paints over the page to remind me of stars. The rest was easy. I die cut the Fancy Celebrate Die out of both gold and black papers and offset them to give a shadow effect and glued it to the center of the card. The hardest part, probably, was deciding on the colors.

You can see the shine of the gold watercolor a little bit in these photos.

For my next card I needed just a bit more skill, but not much.

For this card I used one of the pages from Altenew’s Watercolor Coloring Book. I love this book because the flowers are already “stamped” on to watercolor paper. Plus there are two pages for each flower: one done in a black outline and the other done with a very light grey for a no-line watercolor look. For this card I wet each petal, separately, and dropped paint on to the base of the petal and let the water color flow to the edges of the petals. I tried to put a little more paint at the base of the petals for shading, and less paint, to almost none, at the tips to show highlights. I did the same with the leaves, not even being very careful to stay inside the lines, or go right to the edge of the lines; kind of a loose watercolor technique. I tried to do the same for the flower center, but I see there is not much shading there. I think, after it was fully dry, I could have gone in with a darker brown and just put a few dots here and there to give some shading and texture. For that matter I still could. I added brown spatters over the entire image, because that seems to be the going trend right now. I don’t always like the spatters, but in this case I think they worked.

My last card required a little more skill. I’ve been working on my shading technique, and I think I’m coming along just fine. Still not a master.

For this card I used Altenew’s CYLPK: Always Sunshine. I stamped on watercolor paper with embossing ink and embossed with Altenew’s Pure White embossing powder. I love embossing the image I’m going to watercolor because the raised embossing keeps the paint for going outside the drawing. That’s my biggest problem with watercolors, and no embossing line. I can’t seem to stay inside the lines. I need to go back to Kindergarten and coloring 101! While painting I tried to think where the darkest part of the flowers or leaves would be and make the paint darker there. Also, I looked where the petals curve or bend to emphasize that with shading. I’ve watched hours and hours of videos of people watercoloring and tried my hand at it. I am getting better, practice makes perfect (better). So if this kind of watercoloring looks daunting to you, start with the first two techniques and practice, practice, practice.

Enjoy the rest of the hop. I hope you pick up some cool and valuable techniques.

Now for the fun stuff:

Prizes:

$130 in total prizes! Altenew is giving away a $20 gift certificate to 3 lucky winners and a $15 gift certificate to 4 winners! To win, please comment on the Altenew Card Blog and/or each designer’s blog post on the blog hop list below by 10/30/2022. 

There’s MORE! Join our party! We have included an Inlinkz at the Altenew blog for you to enter your beautiful, Altenew “Secret Card Recipe” creations. 

We will pick one of our favorite handmade creations from those who joined the linky party, and they will receive a $10 Altenew gift certificate!

Altenew will draw 5 random winners from the comments left on each blog hop stop and announce the winners on the Altenew Winners Page on 10/31/2022.

Altenew Card Blog

Laurie Patterson <—You are here—>

Irene Mejia <—Go here next—>

Roteja Galvan

Virginia Lu

Pam Boedeker

Neha Aggarwal

Nancy Souza

Helen Kalb

Rachael Shedeed

Rosie Neustaedter

Nicki Baxley

Joylita D’Souza

Lana Taber

Bridget Casey

Nandini Karmarkar

Teri Duncan

Eva Bussom

April Leithner

Amy Hill

Jennifer Leonard

Sue Busada

Annemarie Caister

Natasha Davies

Anna Patricia Mahtani

Fiona Duff