7 Day Watercolor Cardmaking Challenge

1. Introduction: Hi, I'm Sarah Douglas, card maker, crafter and small business owner. And in this class, where kick-starting your creativity with a seven-day watercolor card making challenge. In this class, we'll create seven beautiful handmade cards together, one each day for a week and under 15 min a day will be using simple watercolor techniques and straightforward designs to create our greeting cards. By limiting our time spent, we're taking off the pressure. No need to worry about getting something to look perfect or just dive again, I'm making that space for creativity in our day. You can use this class as 15 min a day warm-up for whatever creative activity you have planned that day. Or you can do all the cards in one lung session or one each day. It's entirely up to you, whatever suits you best. This class is about having fun and experimenting with whatever materials you have. You don't need to have the same supplies as me. You don't need to make exactly the same cars. It's all about having fun and being creative. This class is suitable for beginners and watercolor and card making. So you'll definitely benefit from a few basic card baking supplies such as stamps and can embellishments. I for making cars for over ten years now. And I love combining craft supplies and watercolors to create unique handmade cards. I run a small business called sticky kitten, designing and making craft supplies such as patents, paper stamps, stickers and embellishments. And my handmade cards have appeared in magazines and on TV. I can't wait for you to join me in this class to create seven of your own unique and beautiful handmade cards. 2. Project Overview and Supplies : For our class project, we'll be spending seven days creating one card each day and under 15 min. By the end of the class, not only will you have seven beautiful handmade card ready to give to your family or friends. But you'll hopefully have loosened up and warmed up with your watercolor practice and your card making. And you'll feel a bit more at ease. Making time for creativity in your day. Supplies I'm using for this class and clear this pastel dreams watercolor palette from Prima. I love these colors because they're really bright and vibrant and you don't need to mix them. And they come out very brightly with quite a fun application of color. I'm also using a size four round brush. This style around me. I could find smooth watercolor paper, which is a hot pressed paper. And I'm cutting that into small sections to fit each of my cards. You don't have to use exactly the same supplies as me, please do just use whatever you have. I would recommend hot press paper because we are going to be stamping on it. And if you have cold pressed paper that might be a little bit too grainy, but you can try it out. What works best for you. You also don't need this exact brand of watercolor paper, but I do recommend having a good quality watercolor paper because that will make a difference to the overall quality of your finished cards. In terms of card making supplies, you'll need some A6 white card blanks, and these often come in big packs like this with envelopes already included. You'll need a good water resistant black ink like this Momento tuxedo black ink. They'll need some sentiment stamps. Say something like this. I say happy birthday or thank you or whatever sentiments you want to use on your cards. You will need a clear stamping block and acrylic block to use with place stamps. And you'll also want some embellishments, some silver gems like this, some colorful ribbon in terms of adhesives and using foam tape on nearly all of the cards, tacky glue and also some foam pads like this. Some extras I'm using that you may not have include punches. So I have a Cloud punch. I have a two-inch circle punch, but don't worry if you don't have anything like that, I'll give you an alternative and looking to use those for the cards. And I also have a printed ephemera packed with some weather themed pieces that I'm using for one of the cards. If you don't want to make cars, you can do this practice in your sketch book, of course. And you can paint or use calligraphy where I've used stamped elements. It's entirely up to you. Let's dive in. 3. Day 1: Watercolour Birthday Candles: Hello and welcome to day one of the challenge. We're going to start with a really simple cards. So I've just made a rough mock-up pair of what I wanna do my car, just three simple candles that I'm going to stamp the sentiment underneath. So what I've done to start with, as I've just taken some watercolor paper. So this is what I'm using, the aquifer and smooth hot press watercolor paper, and I'll just cut it into quarters. And I'm just going to check the size that it gets my card blank. Before I start, I'm using an A6 card blank. And when I put the finished piece on top, I want it to leave a small border so I know that I need to trim this piece down a little bit. I'll just do it by eye. I'm not going to measure it and to trim it down. I'm just using a ruler and a craft mat and a knife, but you can just use scissors. Okay, so that looks like a good fit. I'm happy with that border. So this is the right size to start painting. I'm using the premium marketing pastel dreams. What's color palettes? I love this pellet because it has all pastel shades in it. And you really don't need to mix the colors very much. You can just pay and they come out ready vibrantly. So let's start with the middle candle. I'm not too worried about these being perfect or knee. In any way. Autistic masking is just kind of a fun way to create the card. And the reason that I'm doing this on watercolor card rather than straight on a card. Blank is firstly because we do really need watercolor paper. And secondly, because if it comes out in a way that I'm not really happy with, I can just redo it and I haven't wasted a card like we have a Blake handouts bit fab enough mud will have a pink one, maybe a light pink actually. So of course, with their son, with all of the cards that we'll do in this challenge, you can choose whatever colors you like best or that you think your recipient of the card will like best. I just really loved these pastel colors. So I'm going to use this palette for all of my cards in this challenge, but you can mix it up and two completely different color mixes for each card. Or you can keep them all along a similar theme, just whatever suits you best. Okay, here we go. Let's just neaten up that blue one a little bit. Then we'll let some flames on top and yellow. I'm going to add a dark, dark pink in the middle. Mentioned we'll just mix. Make it look a little bit more flame like. Okay. Now we can just leave that to dry before we start the sentiment. But in the interests of just saving time, I'm gonna go ahead and do it now. You can use whatever sentiments need. So if you need birthday cards for birthday sentiments, so if you need a kind of celebration card or happy anniversary, or as we go through, just choose whatever sentiment you need for the occasions that you have coming up. Okay, so I have a clear stamping block which is a little bit grubbing. I was using it to try out some watercolor techniques last night. And I'm gonna go for, it's your birthday, will do. It's your first. Let's move this out of the way. And the income using is this Momento tuxedo black dye ink. It's a water resistant ink which we don't really need right now, but we will for some of the lighter cars because we'll be starting on top of watercolor. Not while it's wet, but never know. So to clean these stamps off, you can use a baby wipe or soap and water or like a stamp shammy, which I have, but I don't know where it is. So I'm just going to start this off on a bit of scrap paper to clean it. And now I will stamp birthday underneath. Cool. Once this is dry, I'm going to mount it to my card blank. And I can stick it down flat with some tacky glue or I can raise it up a little bit using some foam type. So this is the foam tape that I use. So just three pieces along the back. Stick it to the card blog on your card for the day is done. Thank you for joining me for today's cars and I'll see you tomorrow for our next one. 4. Day 2: Watercolour Birthday Cake: Hi everyone. Thank you for joining me on day two of our car making challenge. So today I want to make a cake card. We're going to paint the layers of the cake with watercolors, something like this. Except I've written on my little draft here that I would maybe want to do them a bit closer together. And then we're going to stamp the sentiment underneath again, same as we did yesterday. I've just trimmed down my watercolor paper to fit the A6 card blank. And we are going to paint on here and then stamp underneath, similar to yesterday's card. So let's get started. Again. You can just use whatever colors you like. So I'm just going to pull some nice looking colors from my pastel palette here. On the button. Yeah, we want do we want I think '40s? Yeah, Let's go for four days. It's gonna be a lavish cake on your birthday, doesn't it? So maybe if we stop about halfway down, you'll notice that I haven't sketched anything out. I'm just starting where I think and painting and that's just because well, firstly, copy. Not really want to spend a long time sketching and getting things perfect. I'd rather just dive in and start and then redo it a couple of times if I have to, if it doesn't look right, you know, I think you kind of do these creativity exercises enough times your confidence grows a little bit. And that's the aim of this class really, so that by the end of it, you'll be feeling a bit more ready to dive into something creative each day. So you can kind of use this as a warm up each day to whatever you're doing. You can carry on beyond this as well. You don't just have to stop at seven if you have other ideas, you can carry on. And of course you can adapt this for different times of year as well. So we've done a birthday card yesterday in a birthday once a day. It's near Christmas, then maybe you can change it up a bit. And this could be like a red and green Christmas cake or something like that. And of course, you could do Christmas candles that we did yesterday. This is a poly. So these are just ideas to get you kick-started really on doing something each day. And the reason that I liked this is because it's a combination of two of the things that I love. So I love doing kind of quick, pretty watercolors, and I love making cards. And this is kinda the best of both. What color should we have them talk? A green. What flavor that would be meant to maybe strawberry underneath the blue, the blue brain, my son would say. Okay, well that's a little candles. We'll just use brown. I'm going to do them quite finely. And then just a little bit of yellow on top for the flames of the candles. Go. Now you can leave this to dry now, or you can do your stamping and then leave it to dry. I'm just going to go ahead and do the stamping. I'm using the same set and I'm gonna use the sentiment celebrate just to stamp underneath the cake here. Let's close this and we'll get out the ink pad. If you're not a competent stamper, you might want to stamp on a small piece of separate card first and then stick it on. But I'm just going to take the risk and stamp straight onto. Here. We go. Cool. So that card is done. We just need to mount it onto the card blank when it's dry. And if that's a little bit too plain for you and you have a little bit more time. If you've got more than 5 min in your day, you can add some little extra embellishments, may be some gems or maybe you could paint some extra details on the cake, or you could draw some confetti in the air or whatever you wanna do. Think I will add a little bit more detail to mine. So I'm gonna just add some confetti around the cake. What color should we do? What do orange, just tiny little stars. Some purple bits to go for that. I'm doing them in threes because things tend to look quite good and not something above here to thank you for joining me for today's challenge, and I'll see you tomorrow for our next time. My God. 5. Day 3: Stamped Circle Card: Hello and welcome to day three of our card making challenge. So today we're going to do a really, really simple quick card. And we're just gonna do a circle of watercolor paint and then some stamping on top and underneath. So just as with the other cards, I've trimmed this down to fit the card blank. And I'm going to go for just this nice pastel blue color. I think quite a pale color. And all I'm gonna do is the big circle, the center towards the top. And then when that's dry, I'm just going to stamp straight on it. It looks a little pale, so maybe I'll mix in some of this dark. We want bigger size. Just dropping a bit more pigment. I'm worried about it being perfectly round. I will just drop in a bit more pigment there. Okay, So leave that to dry and then we'll do our stamping on top. So I'm using the same stamp set as the previous two days. And I'm just going to use this cake image. Of course you just use whatever image that you want from your stamp sets. Or if you don't want to stamp. And like kind of doodling or illustration, you could always sketch a little picture and fine line there. Instead. I'll just hold it on for a few seconds to allow time for the ink to transfer. There we go. That looks good. It's pretty central. And I'm going to stamp a sentiment underneath as well. I'm going to stamp Happy Birthday, so let's do happy first. You can put them both on the stamp block, can stamp together. But I just find that to align them nicely. It's sometimes better to stamps separately. If you are into calligraphy, instead of stamping a sentiment you like, you might like to handwrite one. So you can just make this challenge completely around adapt which aspects we like to use. So I can see that my paper is a bit rough on one edge. So instead of trimming that down before I put it on the card, what I'm actually going to do is make the other edges refer to match. And you can do that with scissors or a craft knife. So I'll just use this craft knife and I'll run it along the edge. And it gives a nice rustic textured paper book. Again. Then we just need to mount that to our card blank with foam tape. You can use scissors to cut your foam tape, but I find it tends to make them quite sticky. So I just tear it. Difficult though it is it doesn't have to look neat on the back. Here we go. I can see that I've smushed my ink a little bit here too, which isn't great. So I'll have to think about some embellishments that I might be able to add to cover that up. Maybe some strategically placed gems. Thanks for joining in today's challenge and I'll see you again tomorrow. 6. Day 4: Weather Card: Hello everybody and welcome to day four of our challenge. In my pile of ideas here. Challenge for today is going to be to create a card based on a weather theme. So what I want to do is just watercolor as simple sun and then put a cloud on top and then we're going to have some text and some rain drops. So let's make a start on our card. Same as we've done the other day is A6 card again. Just turn that down. Just do it by eye so I'm not measuring anything. But then what I will do is check it fits I want yes, that's fine. So what I'm going to do first is to create the Cloud. So I actually have a punch which punches out a cloud shape. But what you can do is just sketch out the cloud and cut that out. If you don't have anything like this to hand. I've got some scrap card here and I'm going to use, I think I should just about fit a cloud. Try not to waste any scraps of paper. Let it go. I want my cloud around here. So one of the things that I do for cars that are maybe a little bit more complex is kind of plan them out first before I start sticking things down. So I know I want my cloud about here and I'm going to paint a sunshine here. And then let's think about some other elements too. So I want to put some of these crystal raindrop type of gems on the card. And I also have this pack of ephemera with different sentiments and images. So she is a sentiment, a car to brighten your day that I want in the bottom corner. And I could add one of these other pieces too. So a rainbow or an umbrella maybe. But let's see how it looks after we paint the sunshine in first. So if I look back, my quick sketches are two different types of sudden. So I think I prefer the lines, so maybe that's what I'll do, but it's a bit bright. I might try and add more water to my paint to make it a little bit more washed out from there. Now make it thicker to want to think, maybe I want it coming off the edge of the paper. Maybe I want it like quite a great big bright sunshine. Yes, I'm just going to paint right off the edge onto my Mac. Then some rays, flesh less starch. And I met him quite Eve and maybe we'll have some alternating long and sharp race. Okay, happy enough with that. It's just something simple. And then we want the cloud there. So I want the clouds to be raised up. So I'm going to use some foam tape to do that. Her butt off. And again, you can cut out with scissors, but it tends to gunk up businesses. Just rip this off. This is still wet. And the interests saving time, it's going to stick it on. So where do we want our Cloud? Well, let's have a think about the other elements. So maybe we want that down there. Maybe I want because this is a car to brighten your day. We're going to put some raindrops on it. So should we have an umbrella to maybe just have a play around with your cards as well. Whatever elements you have to do your weather themed card. Just kind of move them around and, and see what you think you're going to look like the Lakoff. I might put that cloud there, then have some fella off to the side here. And then I'll have some raindrops. Haven't done my son paler. Maybe it would've been better, brighter, but it is what it is because these cards is so quick. What I would do if I'm not completely happy is I would probably just make another one of these cards. Just do it. Do another one. Instead of trying to redo or fix what I have. Just make another quick card the same, then fixing the bits that I don't like. So let's have that written down that you have this here, maybe. Then let's stick this piece down too. Then we'll add some gentle, some raindrops. So you can use, you can try and use your fingers for these. But if you have a pair of tweezers for any gems or embellishments that you have, but sometimes can make life a little bit easier. So rather than trying to pull them straight off, I slide them along the backend to get them off. I'm just putting these particular plan, just see what looks nice, looks like this. And then we can attach this panel to our code base. Paint is still a bit wet, so I might do is just the strips on here in roughly the right place and then put the panel on top. Again, what we're all about in this challenge is kind of quick cards, just something to dip into and sparks some creativity each day. Doesn't have to be a masked face, just some things, fun and bright. You go, that'll be enough to attach our panel. Doesn't matter if the tape is messy because we're not going to see it. So let's try and get this in the center. I mean, you may prefer to let us dry before you try and do this, but I'm happy to just go ahead and thank you for joining me for today's challenge. I hope your cards have come out as beautifully as you want it and I will see you again for tomorrow's times. 7. Day 5: Rainbow Watercolour Wash: Hello everybody and welcome to day five of our code making challenge. Today we're going to do a watercolor ombre, a wash, something like this. And then we're going to stamp her sentiment in the middle once it's dry. So to start with, I'm going to tape this down to my craft board because I actually want it to have a border around the edge, unlike this sample one that I did, I want it to have a neat straight edge. So I'm going to use washi tape if it will behave to mask off the edges so that hopefully when I peel it off at the end, we'll have some nice straight lines. So I'm just going to spend a bit of time doing this so that it looks neat and the paint won't seep underneath. Okay, after much messing about with useless washi tapes, I've finally tape this down. And so what I'm gonna do is just strips of color across the whole piece paper and then just let them blend together. So I'm going to do this wet on wet. So I'm going to wet the paper first just to allow the colors to blend by themselves as they go across. You can do this with a bigger brush to make it quicker, but this is just what I've got to hand. If I'd been organized enough, what I could have done was some kind of a at least piece of cardboard or something so I can tip it forwards and let the excess trip to the bottom and then just clear away the bead of water. But it's done. So we put about the right amount on. But we'll see I'm going to start with this kind of darker rose pink color and just do a straight alone. I think it might be going underneath, but we'll see when we take the tape off, what's happened. Then going into Should we have next given to orange and then a yellow? If I want the colors to blend a bit more, I might just add a little more to mind too much if it blooms, I quite like that effect. And by blooms, I mean, when it dries like that, I know some people don't like that. Look, they didn't like it when that happens. But now I'm going to go straight into blue paint, a strip of town. It's quite a light color, so we just need to add a bit more pigment. Then let's try and pick a slightly brighter place and how that, but the nice thing about this pastel palette is that you don't really need to worry about color mixing. So if you've got a palette where you need to mix all these bright colors to get the effect you want them. This type of card will take you a little bit longer. Then just at the end. Do this green and then finished with it. I wasn't planning to do this many colors, but then purple. So all we need to do is to just leave that to dry and then we can take the tape off and see how it looks. Came we had a little bit of a bleed through on this side and a little patch missing up here. Mind if that has happened on nosy, you've had a lot of it bleed through and you don't like it. If it looks really bad, I guess what you could do is just completely trim the borders off and you adjust the painted piece, but this will do for now. I'm okay with this. Hopefully you've also trimmed down your card before you began, so it fits on there. But if not, I'll just trim it off now so that it fits on your card blank. And what we're gonna do now that the stri is just sample on top. So I'm keeping this simple and all I'm gonna do is, uh, sentiment in the middle of the card here. So again, I'm using this same sentiment stamp set. You just use whatever stamps you have to hand are I've mentioned before, if you're particularly good at calligraphy or hand lettering and want to do something yourself in the middle of your card, then by all means do that. I'm not great at calligraphy. I am going to stick with stamping for mine. So let's choose a sentiment. So what I've done is just aligned the stamps on here roughly where I think I want to stamp the sentiments, Sex, I've got lots of space. I've gone for a longer one. So it's going to say hip, hip hurray, it's your day. And I'll start with the bigger words first, array and day, and then I'll stamp the other to the side. You can stop them all together if you've got stamps that fit closely. But because I want to get the positioning to be more precise, because that's the focal point of the card that I'm going to stump these separately. So let's start with array. So we want that about. Again, I'm using this Momento tuxedo black dye ink. So now we'll start the next part. Beginning of the picker word again. Okay. Stan thing is done. I'm pleased with how that's come out. If you're not happy with yours, if you've got smudges or the placement doesn't look as good as you want it. You can always stump again on a separate bit of cod and just place it over the top, raise it up or foam tape and cover the part that you're not happy with. It's always a good solution for covering up any bits that you don't like when you're crafting, just stick something over the top. It looks a little plain to me. So maybe I'm going to add some embellishments. So I'll use the same gems that I've used on the previous cards we've done and put some little g you drop type gems on here. I want them together or do I want them spaced far apart? If I just drop them on their first, I can move them if I change my mind. Why do we want that? Show? Gems are pinging all over the place, by the way is mine have been just kind of put your finger on them as you would like sliding them off. Otherwise they'll be like Gems all over the place. We finding gems in the carpet for days. If you put them on, very likely to start with, you can move them around. If you don't like the position. You can even put the back on the sheet if you change your mind. Like if we group them together, I stuck that on down firmly so that one's staying. You can spend quite a while moving things around to get them to look as you want them. So because this is a simple college, and if you have some time left and you're sort of ten, 15 min a day. You can take your time to place the gems as you want. Whatever looks good to you. Great. And then three is like that. Then if you're happy with that position, then just press them down. We need to do now is just mount this to our cart like so. Same with the others. I'm just going to use foam tape to do that. Just check that that's gonna be in the center before you stick it down. Okay. Upside down. Well, you know what happens? What I normally do if I do something like that as I just cut off the card blank and stuck on any one. So that's what we're gonna do. Nice things just happened. Don't know. I'm rushing to finish because my daughter needs a bath. So let's stick that on a new car blank and then we're done. Easily fixed. And then that I can use for some standing. We go, we've just made an extra second durable. So just some tacky glue on the back. You know what, why not leave these mistakes then? And then if you do the same thing as me, a good way to fix it. Let me go right way up this time. So thank you for joining me for today's card making challenge, and I will see you again tomorrow. 8. Day 6: Aperture Heart Card: Hi everyone and welcome to day six of our card making challenge. So today I want to make an aperture card. And I'm gonna do that by having the worst color element underneath and a panel on top that I'll cut a shape out of so we can see some block colors that we're going to do underneath. I'm gonna do a heart shape and today I'm making a Mother's Day card, but just use whatever shape or whatever sentiment fits the occasion that you need. So to start with what I'm going to do, you can see I've cut my watercolor paper dad's size already to fit on the A6 card blank. And I'm just going to trim this down to match. So I'll just use this piece as a template. And I'm going to trim it smaller. So I will draw around so I can see the size. And then I'll actually just cut off more. And I'll do that evenly. Top and bottom. Again, I always prefer using my craft knife, but you can of course, just use scissors. What if you have to hand? Okay, and then we'll just check that this layers up as we want before we do anything with it. So that looks like an even border. I'm happy with that. So what I want is a heart-shaped aperture here. If you have a die casting machine and a dy, then you can use that to get a really smooth, professional, heart-shaped if you have a heart die. But for anyone who doesn't have that equipment, what you can do is just draw a heart and cut it out. So let's do that. I want it to be roughly in the middle. So let's see, about halfway. Want to leave for him for sentiment. Will make the cut with a craft knife and I'll carry on with, this is around the inside of where I've drawn the line. But if you can see the pencil line too strongly to the craft knife, then I can always flip it over and use the reverse. I would definitely use it die and die casting machine for this if you have it because it'll look much neater. You know what? I've done it wrong, have an I, because I'm keeping this bit. So what I wanna do actually is outside of the line. So if you've done the same as me, then no worries. We just redo the outside the line. Don't worry. You're probably thinking why she did it like that. Well, it wasn't meant to be, you know, why I keep these things in so that if you've done the same as me, then you know how to rectify it. Okay, So we're gonna cut round. I'm trying to do it as neatly as I can sign and spending a bit of time on there. Okay. So we have our heart shape. You can flip it over and see which side looks nicer. Layer it up. Like this. Like this. It looks a little choppy maybe. Should we use it like that? I think I'll go with that. Then what I want to do is just paint some blocks of color underneath so that they show through the heart. So I might just roughly mark out where my heart is so that I can get the effect I want my guess there's no kind of clever way to do this. I'm just going to sketch underneath and try and get a rough line. So I know lots of pain somewhere to not bother painting. Yeah. That's fine. You're not going to see that. We're going to raise it up with foam tape. But he shouldn't be able to see that. So I'm gonna go for three colors. I'm going to get some pinks. I'm going to start with this dark one. Do you like a kind of want quite a squishy effect? Go for the medium pink, the lightest pink. Looking at the oranges that okay. I want it to have this kind of brushed effect, so I'm not completely filling it in. I want it to look swished. It's not really the word for it. But you know what I mean? Like white bits. So you can just kind of hold that above and see if that looks kinda how you want. That looks okay to me. So we can just leave that to dry. And then what we'll do is put foam tape on the back of this panel. Get it ready to go over the top. In terms of sentiments, I have this happy Mother's Day sentiment. That's what I'm doing with this card. You can use a sentiment stamp that you've got or you can print something out like this. Type on a computer, print it out, cut it out. Whatever you wanna do with your sentiments. It's not fly my desk shoe. But this is from my sticky kitten range of femora for a pack of everyday sentiments. And I just love these because when you're designing cards, you can just grab whatever fits and build up a card really quickly. If you're not in the mood or the position, show any stamping that day. You can just use those pre premade ones. Okay, so let's get off foam tape. Let's do it straight along the sides. When you put this on the back. Again, I should use this but it comes up my scissors, so I just try and tear it. It doesn't always work. So Let's just look it up and he is my son does not have to clean them afterwards. Um, what was I saying? When using foam tape? You just patch it in really. Wherever it needs to go. We're going to let me do a full strip along the bottom. Not quite a good thing about foam tape. I suppose you can just cut it to fit. You can cut it at certain angles. Let's have a piece of metal that it doesn't have to be neat. You can not going to see this. However you want to do it. Then we're going to need to send a bit along the top, along the side of it. The aim is to get it fairly even so that you don't have parts of this panel which dip more than the others. Otherwise it can look buckled. Nearly bag will have **** piece here. And I just want something to support maybe that corner in that space a little bit more. Let's just check when we can't see any visible pieces of tape. That's good. So remove the backing next. If you're wondering why did you get double-sided tape? I'm most craft stores will have it. Or if you're more of an ICO crafter and try to avoid using phones and plastics and things like that and you're crafting. And an alternative is to use pieces of cardboard stacked up. Now that can give you the, the depth and the height that you want without using fine pieces. So let's just align this as best we can. So once you stick it down, it's not coming off. We go. Then I'm going to attach this to the card. I'm just going to clear it. We could use another layer of foam tape if you want, but I'm happy with the amount of dimension we've got from just one layer. So I'll just glue this on. This is tacky glue. Just a bit thicker than PVA, but it's essentially the same sort of thing. Never go. And then we need to make a decision about our sentiment. So I can have it right on the bottom or cross the center out to the side. I quite like doing things slightly off-center off to the side. But at the bottom also looks nice. It's a little bit planes, so we probably want to add some extras. So what I also want to put on this card. So I've got a piece of ribbon here. So I'm going to tie this into a bot and that's gonna go on as well. So what I do with embellishments, sometimes it's it's kinda get them ready and place them on the card and move them around and decide where they look best before I actually stick anything down. That's kinda one of the parts I enjoy the most actually. It's like that little mini design process of seeing what looks best way to one it's adding and what needs removing, getting the balance of whitespace, write your code looks kind of well-designed. Okay, so we've got a bot. Let's make the loops look a bit nicer. Tuck them up a bit that down. We've got happy Mother's Day. It's quite a long Sentiment. I'd rather it was on two lines if you see what I mean, but well, it is what it is. We'll see what we can do with that. Let's see what looks nicest. It might take you a bit of time to do this on your own card and that's alright. You can take that time to make sure it looks good. To make sure it's styled how you want. It's quite sweet. Card also need something else, maybe a little plane. Sometimes I play my cards out beforehand and sometimes I don't. I just test them out when I make them. Either is fine. Sometimes you find that if you do plan your cards, you'll end up making something different to what you thought anyway. And you think, Oh, well, I might as well have just tested it out. Instead of planning or sketching. Sometimes it can be fun to sketch out cod ideas and designs. First. We have a bow in the middle. Do we not want to take node? I think we want to take away from the element two way. Why did I have it before that I thought was alright, Was it further down? That's the other thing. If this is a few variations that you think oh, that looks okay, That looks okay. You can just take a photo and then move your elements round and then have like a swipe through your photos. And then pick the layout that you think looks the best and go with that. Happy Mother's Day. I'm gonna go with that. I want to raise this up. I think I will raise this up. So what I've also got his phone, my trauma here, I've got these little foam hexagons. So when foam tape is too big or bulky, he sees little foam pieces. Normally famous glass, but these are for Mexicans. Have that along the bottom. And just put things in a little desk pen as you go with a wise you find, you get pieces everywhere. And then when I've finished Crafting, I just emptied my mini desk been day. And then with ribbon I tend to use tacky glue. Just in key pieces, in key places on the back. The lips, the middle. The long bits. Then have that off to the side, slightly touching the sentiment. You might have an IFA to sign quicker than mine and you can get the placement right straight away, but it usually takes me a little while to do something. I'm happy with. That. That's looking quite sweet. I could add some gems or something. If I was going to add those, I might do them. Maybe curving around that just to add a bit of balance to the elements. But for now, I'm going to keep it like this. So thanks for joining in for today's challenge, and I'll see you tomorrow. 9. Day 7: Watercolour Leaves: Hello everyone and welcome to Day Seven, final day of our card making challenge. I'm so pleased that you're still here with me and that we've reached the end. This is our last card a week's worth of cards. So if you're here and you're on your seventh, then well done. Congratulations. I'm so glad that you've been able to craft a long. So what we're gonna do for our final card is watercolor leaf background pattern. So here I've just used a practice piece to see what kind of leaves I want to do. I tried out a few different designs. So here I've done kind of a shape with a gap in the middle. This one, I've done leaves with a trailing stalk. Then in here I tried, I'm pressing the brush down like that and lifting it off. So have a little experiment first on a scrap piece of card and see how you wanna do your lease. There's no right or wrong way. And then when you're happy with the look of them, or if you'd like a mix, you can do that too. Then you can do your card ready version. So let's make a start doing leaves. So same watercolor palette that I've been using for all the cards. And I'm gonna go for this orientation again. So this is called a tenfold because it stands up like a tent, I suppose. So again, I've changed the paper to size and I know that it fits. And what I'm gonna do and I've painted the leaves, I'm going to use a circle punch to stamp out a piece of a playing card. And I'm going to stamp on the card and put that on top. So that's what, that's why the sentiment will go. So we don't need to leave a gap or anything because we're going to put a piece on top. So let's start painting some leaves. I've got this color hair, which is quite bright and that's what I used for this one. But I'm going to go for something a little bit more subtle and just mixing this color here that's already on my palette. So I think this is just this green that I've already dampen down with a little bit of this brown. So we can add a bit more and just take some of the intensity of that color, make it a little bit more of a muted green. I'm just going to stop. Don't know what kind of leaves I want to do. Like to mix again, the ones that are painted like a gap and the ones where I press the brush down and lifted at all. And you can choose what size you want it to. Your leaves. Really big leaves are small leaves. About why I'm gonna do is just vary the direction of the leaves ago and you can think about whether you want to have some leaves coming off the edge as well as though this is part of a continuous pattern or whether you just want to keep them enclosed within the page. So I can do some of the stalk like that. Press down, lift off. This is quite a slow, peaceful, kind of hard to make. We're not in a rush to dash their leaves. You can do if you want to make it quickly, you can do some super-quick leaves, just dash, dash, dash, dash, dash plus the page. But I'm just going to take my time on these. You can also treat this as an exercise in brushwork as well, like I've had practice and brush control. If you want to try and do like a fine stalk and then the big part of the leaf and then lift up. You can treat this brush control exercises you can do with the added bonus that you can make it to come out. I'm quite happy with this. Color is coming out. I think what I will do is just go off the edge. It looks as part of a larger pattern. I quite like to leave gaps. You could do solid leaves if you like that look. But I find that when I leave gaps in my leaves and flowers, much prefer the way they look. I think it's because it draws attention to the fact that they're painted look like blobs on the page. They look a bit more artistic. Hospice mean, I'm no expert in watercolor. I just don't like the look of whatever works. But there are some amazing classes here on Skillshare you can take if you really want to get kind of leaves and flowers down to some really amazing detail, the rules of classes you can take. For me at this stage, watercolor is something I do more relaxed I suppose, and just feel like I've got something artistic and creative in my life because I do run a creative business. Now that I have two children, it feels like there's really not much time at all for creativity, for anything. More than anything, had a relaxing face. That's one of the reasons why I wanted to do this. Challenge this class. Because for anyone who like me struggles to find just 15 min a day to, to do something like this. Then I wanted to show you, I suppose that if you can just grab that precious time and do something that is really low effort and low stress. And then at the end of it you can think, well, you know what, I've got a bundle of cars that I can then use for whatever's coming up. So it's not fun if it serves a dual purpose of the bit of time to self creativity and also that time. Feel like you've actually made something and produce something and look, these pretty things exist now because of that quick time that you put in. Here we go when elite. And then of course there's a variation if you wanted, you could do this a different colored leaves. You don't have to do a page of green leaves you can have, you could do like Autumn Leaves, different browns, yellows and goals, or you could do Party leaves and pink and blue on whatever. Like I've splashed my card. Let's see if I can drop that off. It's gonna get covered anyway. See with my classes you get a little messy that's lifting. Once that dries, we can make the sentiment to go on top. So I'm just going to check that that covers the smashes. This it does. So let's just put that up here. What I'm going to do is use the circle punch to purchase that. Now I imagine not everyone has a circle punch. So what you can do obviously is just to draw around something and cuts it out. If you have a dipole, a machine and some circuit dies and he could do that. This is just some scrap card. We don't need the bank, we're just going to use the front so it doesn't matter what's on the back. Just position it out. Say Look, I positioned it and I still managed to get it wrong. I'm trying to be economical and see how many second look and get out of this scrap card. Doesn't matter. We'll just do it in the middle. Okay? So what I'm gonna do is stamp the sentiment of hair sticking up for it didn't punch very well. And so I'm using a different sentiment pack. So this is a company called waffle flower, and this is a sentiment set called essential celebrations. So I'm going to make a baby card. I'm going to go for the welcome sweet baby sentiments. And I'm going to stamp it in black ink. I really loved these scripty sentiments. I think they make a great professional with, without too much effort. Do have my own range of stamps on sticky kitten website. But for these cards, I wanted to kind of like a script d flowing type sentiment. I don't quite have a set that has not yet anyway. It was designed more stamps sets, but we're not there yet. Let's think this one up. Let's check. My leaves are a little bit thick. Lines. You can learn and do better next time. Yeah, maybe dainty leaves. You know what, it doesn't have to be absolutely perfect. It's a process. It's a process. We can do it over and over, make it better and better each time. But as long as you enjoy it and you're okay with what you've made. You don't have to be perfectly happy with it, but you don't want to hate it. If you really hate it, then maybe do. And again, I really like, I want to make things that I'm happy with it. If I hate it, I would do it again, but it's okay. Okay. This is mostly dry. We've got one or two white leaves still, but I'm gonna go ahead and put this on the middle. I'm using foam hexagon xdx again. So just whatever sticky pads that you've got a fine or you can just deliver on, but it looks better with some dimension. And I'm making this for my friend whose babies due this month. We don't know if it's a boy or a girl, so it's neutral. And then we just need to mount this to the cart. But I think I probably will use tape to raise this up a little bit. I think these leaves in nearly all trice and we should be okay. Just turn it over. Okay. Yeah. You just need to attach this. The front and this card is complete. Let's try and get it central. And I won't press it down too hard in case some of my leaves are still wet. I'll just press it down in between the leaves. It's simple, but I'm pleased with it. Come on and join me over in the next video where I'll just talk through a summary of the cards we've made and some little changes and additions that I made. See you there. 10. Final Thoughts: Thank you for taking part in the seven-day watercolor challenge. I hope you had fun creating your cards. There's just three more things to do. So firstly, have a look through your cards and make sure you're happy. Change anything that you want to. Secondly, please leave a review. Not only does it help me if I can see your feedback and know what you liked and what you didn't like, and what you'd like to see next time in a future class. It also helps your fellow students decide whether this class is for them. And thirdly, don't forget to upload your projects to the project gallery section. I'd love to see what you have made and to give you some helpful and constructive feedback if that is something you would like. So what I did for my cards just before we finish, some of them I kept as I showed them in the video, some of them I add a little bit extra. So the second card from day two, I added a strip of ribbon across the bottom here because I thought it looked a little bit plane at the bottom. The happy birthday cards that we did on day three, or I had a little bit of a smudge on my stamping. I just added some gems to the page, cover up the smudge that and then just some extras to tidal together. The way the column that we did on day four, I went sunshine again with some more yellow pigment because I thought that actually looked a little bit pale. The sun is going to know. The Mother's Day cards. I added a few small gems just around the heart to finish it off and make it look a little bit less play. So again, thank you for joining me and I look forward to seeing your projects uploaded to the gallery.