Polychromatic Cardmaking Class - Altenew

 Hello!  Today I have been working on a card for the Polychromatic Cardmaking Class portion of the Altenew Level 2 Courses.  I had a lot of fun experimenting with using my Altenew watercolor markers on embossed watercolor paper!  Here - let me tell you about it!  Come on in...

First, I selected a stamp and die set that had stamp layers.  I felt like this would work best for what was in my brain for this card.  So I chose the Garden Treasure stamp and die set and used the stamp portion that outlined the flower.  At first, my thought was to use clear embossing powder over Versafine Clear Embossing Ink.  But that didn't really stand out quite the way that I had expected it to, so I then tried Lisa Horton Crafts Cloud 9 Silver Shine Metallic Pigment Ink and the clear embossing powders.  This gave me a very delicate floral shape to enhance with my watercolor brushes.

I actually ended up embossing these flowers twice to get the result that I wanted, which was just a hint of embossed silver, but also just enough to give me a margin of resist for the water-coloring process.  Originally, I had 4 flowers, but ended up using only 2 for the card.

Now that I had the embossed flowers, it was time to use my Altenew watercolor brush markers.  Now, I am NOT a watercolorist, as I have said many times before.  That title belongs to my mother, who is a fantastic artist.  So I planned to put the colors onto my glass mat and then paint them onto my floral embossed canvas.  However, I decided to "Be Brave" and see what happened, so I actually wet the canvas with water, and then allowed color to drop from my brushes onto the wet cardstock.  And the results were quite surprising.  See, I had attempted to use these brushes when my mother was in the hospital (I can't sit there for hours without something to do!) but I ended up with huge blobs of color and no design.  So this was a real happy surprise to me!

Once I had my blooms colored, it was time to dry them so that I could go in with more color in order to make them "polychromatic."  So, I used my trusty heat gun and then went in with more colors.  After die-cutting, I had to decide which of the 4 blooms I wanted to use and finally settled on blue and teal.  I think that the blue blossom was more successful than the teal blossom, but I do love them both.  Not really sure if they qualify as Polychromatic, though.  But there is a graduation in color, of sorts, so I am hopeful.

Time to create a background on which to place my lovely little blooms.  I decided to use another piece of watercolor cardstock and wet it completely with water.  Then I sprayed with three Tim Holtz Distress Spritz sprays - Picked Raspberry, Tumbled Glass, and Peacock Feathers.  After drying with the heat gun, I went back in with Peacock Feathers and Picked Raspberry to add more oomph.  (Y'all understand "Oomph," right?)  Then I hit it with some Sheer Shimmer Sparkle spray and topped it off with hair spray to keep the mica from rubbing off.  

After deciding how to place my blooms, I used foam tape to pop them up on the card.  And then I embossed a sentiment with Black Sparkle Embossing Powder on a scrap of the background and popped that up with foam tape as well.  After adhering the panel to a silver panel, I glued everything to a white card base.  And with that, my Polychromatic Card was finished.

I continually forget to take photos during the making of my cards, but there will be a YouTube video uploaded later tonight just in case you want to see just how this card was made.  It can be found at www.youtube.com/@Jenniferatcreativeartapark - and here are some photos of the finished card:

Thank you for visiting - please consider leaving a comment and following my little blog.  I do greatly appreciate it!!