Altenew July 2022 Marvelous Monthly Series Release Blog Hop + Giveaway ($300 in total prizes)

Hi there! Altenew is releasing a slew of stunning new products today for the July Marvelous Monthly release! You should have arrived here from Soraya Maes, and your next stop is Karen Brown. You can always start back at the beginning at the Altenew Blog in case you get lost. I created a pair of cool lilac and lavender cards with beautiful rose gold metallic accents using the new Build A Garden: Tulip and Friends and the new Craft Your Life Project Kit Always Sunshine. Let’s get started with the details!

For both projects, I heat embossed the images onto Altenew Watercolor Paper using Golden Peach embossing powder. The lovely, subtle metallic embossing powder is a beautiful complement to the shades of cool lilac, lavender, and hydrangea blue watercoloring, which I painted using the Artists’ 24 Pan Watercolor Set.

My first project features the jaw-dropping new Craft Your Life Project Kit: Always Sunshine. I have been having a lot of fun trying to mix and match the incredibly vivid, vibrant colors in the Artists’ 24 Pan Watercolor Set to create more muted, but equally intense, color palettes. For this project, I created a cool lilac, raspberry, and hydrangea blue color palette by adding touches of diluted black to my color palettes. This slightly tones down the vibrancy of the colors while still allowing them to be beautifully intense. I taped an A2 panel down to my watercoloring board, then spritzed it with a light mist of clean water and dropped the colors that I’d mixed up on my palette onto the wet watercolor paper to create this beautiful background. I kept dropping and swirling the colors until I was satisfied with the background. I allowed the piece to air dry while still taped to the board to minimize warping. After it was dry, I splattered some rose gold metallic watercolors in the background to further continue the artistic feel of the background and tie into the rose gold heat embossing.

I had already heat embossed the image from Craft Your Life Project Kit: Always Sunshine onto the corner of an A2 watercolor paper card front so that I knew exactly where to place it. The large size of the main image allows you to maneuver it at different angles to create tons of different looks. I also heat embossed another little sprig of greenery in the leftover space of the watercolor panel so that I could have some ivy dripping down behind the main bouquet. I watercolored the heat embossed and die cut images using the same color palette that was used for the background.

I adhered the finished watercolored images to the watercolored card front using foam adhesive, tucking the extra sprig of greenery behind the main floral arrangement using liquid adhesive. I also die cut a frame from some Brushed Rose Metallic Cardstock using the Fine Frames die set. I added a rose gold embossed greeting from the kit, matting the sentiment strip with some more metallic rose gold cardstock. The colors and layout of this card with the vibrant florals just dripping down the front make this card seem so dramatic to me!

My second project features the new Build A Garden: Tulip and Friends stamps. This set comes with coordinating layered stencils, but I was having one of those days where the watercolors were working exactly how I wanted them to work, so I just went with it. I heat embossed the image twice on my A2 panel of watercolor cardstock, again using rose gold embossing powder. I love how subtle this embossing powder is with the bright blues and greens and purples of the finished card. Just enough pink to warm the cool color palette up a little!

Once I had heat embossed the images, I used some 1″ wide washi tape to mask off around the edges of the entire card front, covering some of the embossed images. I used that washi tape to create a frame around the edge of my card and created a Monet-inspired background of blue, purple, and a couple of touches of lime green.

I removed the washi tape around the edges after the center section had dried completely, then watercolored the hydrangeas and greenery, leaving the tulips for last. I wanted the tulips to be very light in color, and it helps me to keep perspective on how many shadows and how much pigment I’m adding to the image if the areas surrounding it are darker and more vibrant. I added very diluted mixture of pink, purple, and black to just the areas of the tulip that were near the base and curled over in the shadows, smoothing the edges and pulling them out with lots of water to keep some of the white card base shining through. I finished the project off with a few sentiment strips, heat embossed in rose gold on some strips of white cardstock, and popped up using foam adhesive.

Well, that’s all for my projects today! I’m marginally obsessed with this color palette and want to watercolor everything in these shades. Now for some fun giveaway information!

$300 in total prizes! To celebrate this release, Altenew is giving away a $50 gift certificate to 2 lucky winners and a $25 gift certificate to 8 winners! Please leave a comment on the Altenew Card Blog and/or each designer’s blog post on the blog hop list below by 07/18/2022 for a chance to win.

Your next stop on the hop is Karen Brown. Thanks so much for stopping by today, and happy hopping!