Ombre background

Hello

Back in mid January I signed up to do Altenew's Stunningly Simple Watercolor Techniques with Lydia Evans. I love Lydia's work & watching her videos so the idea was to use this class as a sort of warm up before doing the Online Card Classes Watercolor Intermediate which started the following week. I loved every minute of the first 3 days but didn't get any further when my husband collapsed unconscious & was rushed to hospital. He's fine now but still undergoing tests. Needless to say I never got to complete the final 3 days of the course before having to launch straight into the other class once he got out of hospital.
Anyway, this card is from the first day & features watercolour ombre background with Altenew inks.

I didn't deviate too much from the class sample as I will keep my class card for reference purposes. This was a quick & easy background to do and I was really surprised at how lovely the Altenew inks were to work with as a watercolour medium. I would never have thought to use them in that way before. The Altenew Persian Motifs were embossed with white on vellum & fussy cut.

My daughter asked me to make another for her to give as an engagement card so I just changed the sentiment & used a banner.

Apologies for the photography but I forgot to photograph before I gave her the card so she took this with her phone. You would have thought doing another one would have been so easy since I didn't have any trouble with the first one but eight pieces later (yes, eight!) and I was ready to rip my hair out with frustration. I couldn't for the life of me work out why I was getting horrible blotchy marks on the paper. I packed everything up & was about to walk out of the room when the original card caught my eye. Then I had one of those Duh! smack the head type moments & realised what the issue was. Not to be beaten I unpacked everything & tried again and got perfection first time. All the failed pieces had used a cheap student grade watercolour paper & as I've learnt so much this year the quality of the watercolour paper matters a lot! This would be a classic example. Lesson learnt & I now have my watercolour paper organised better so no accidentally grabbing the wrong stuff.

Thanks for visiting.