Watercolored Dear Dahlia Card

I recently saw a blog post with water coloring ideas here: Creating easy watercolor designs (designsrachel.wixsite.com) and loved the technique of creating a water colored panel and then die cutting a section of the panel and popping that part up on foam tape. 

The first step was to water color green, orange, and pink stripes onto watercolor paper. In hindsight, I wish I had made the orange stripe thinner and maybe done more blending between the colors, but every card is a learning experience! Next time I also want to do more of a mix of colors rather than separate stripes like I did here. 

After the watercoloring had dried, I then die cut the floral focal point out of the panel BEFORE stamping it. This paper is heavy, and I have found that my post-it note tape doesn't always hold my dies in place without shifting, so I die cut and THEN stamped the florals using VersaMark ink and Altenew's rose gold embossing powder. The stamp I used is from Altenew's Dear Dahlia's Build A Garden set.

I trimmed the watercolored panel to fit a 5X7 card base and then adhered the background to the card base with ArtGlitter liquid glue. Then I popped up the floral focal point using foam tape and stamped the sentiments "Happy birthday" and "sending lots of love" onto the card front. I added some gold sequins for additional sparkle and then went to work on the inside of the card.

I trimmed a piece of light pink card stock and stamped it using the same Dear Dahlias stamp I used on the front of the card, but this time I stamped partial images onto the top right and bottom left of the pink card stock. I added an orange die cut butterfly to finish the card. I have 3 cousins with February birthdays, so I'm working on cards for each of them this week. 

View of the inside of the card:

Challenges I'm entering:

Inspiration Challenge February 2024 | Mother's Bouquet (altenew.com): (ends at the end of the month)

TIME OUT Challenges: Birthday (1/5; ends 2/28/24) C5

Beautiful Blossoms Challenge: Anything floral goes (ends 3/12/24)

We Love to Create mixed media Challenge Blog...sponsored by Polkadoodles (welove2create.blogspot.com): Anything mixed media goes (ends 2/24/24)

As You Like It Challenge: Favorite: Digital or Physical Stamps and Why: This is such a tough choice as I love to use both kinds of stamps, but lately I've been using a lot of Altenew clear stamps on my cards, like this Dear Dahlia set. I love being able to use VersaMark ink and embossing powder on physical stamps to do heat embossing because it gives such a lovely look to the stamped outline. I also can't use water color paper in my printer, so I like being able to use a physical stamp in my stamp platform for heavier papers that jam up my printer. (1/3; ends 2/21/24)

No more challenges.