Hi friends! I’m joining Altenew today for a blog hop to showcase the newest and latest in the Paint-A-Flower sets, the Iris, and some new watercolor painting products including paints and paper! (more about that in a minute!) Most likely you’ve found your way here via Therese’s blog, but if not, you can click back to the beginning of the hop at the Altenew Card Blog and not miss a thing!
The first thing I want to share is the card I made using the March Paint-A-Flower stamp set: Iris. I broke the rules again and didn’t worry about the lines. Sometimes I just like to get all loosey-goosey and too much coffee helps with that, but this time I just let the paint brush do what it wanted!
Actually, I’ll tell you how it went down. My original intention was to ink up the stamp in several colors of blue, lavender, purple and green, and then to paint the image with clean water, reactivating the inks and letting the color flow into the areas I had made wet with water.
Distress inks are very good at this, and some of the Altenew inks are better at reactivating than others, so with inconsistent results, I used the technique of smearing the same inks I used for stamping, onto a palette mat and picking up the color with a water brush, using that to messily fill in some areas to achieve the original idea I had.
I let the green and turquoise mix, and some blue and lavender as well, and the resulting blends make my heart skip a beat! Yes, I could have simply painted the entire image with watercolor paints, (we have a new paint box being released today after all) but this was the technique I got into my head and like a dog with a bone, I didn’t want to let it go!
Finally, I positioned a variety of the sentiments in the PAF: Lily stamp set over the card panel and stamped with embossing ink and heat embossed with Platinum embossing powder. I used a rectangle stitched die to trim the panel down and matted it with a coordinating teal shade of cardstock.
Next up in today’s release is the Watercolor Essential 12 Pan Set! These are 12 colors beautifully curated from the 36 Pan Set, intensely pigmented, vibrant, high quality paints, and lest you think, yeah, but how much can you do with 12 colors?…!! Let me show you!
My next “project” I’m sharing is less about creating art, but on the other hand though, is ALL about creating art! It’s a practical exercise to show the crazy wide variety of colors it’s possible to make with a basic set like the Watercolor Essential Paint Set.
When you look at the names of the paint colors you’ll see that they match the inks, artist markers, papers and more in the Altenew line up. Along with this paint set, there are two new choices of watercolor paper to paint on! I’m very excited about the papers and I’ll tell you why!
The first of the two watercolor paper choices is the 9″ x 12″, 100% Cotton, Cold Pressed Watercolor Paper Pad. It has 12 sheets of paper in the pad and you’ll see in these photos, the texture this paper has becomes apparent when it is painted on. It has a beautiful woven texture that possibly comes from the actual cotton fibers in the paper. I don’t know how that works, but I love the effect!
The second paper choice is a smaller bundle of loose, A2 sized, Watercolor Paper Set. 50% Cotton, also cold pressed and 24 sheets in the bundle. Unfortunately I don’t have a project to show you painted on this paper for this post, but I can tell you that it is whiter than most watercolor papers I’ve used in past, and whiter than the 100% Cotton paper pad! As well it is much smoother. So you get less of the texture that comes after the paint dries, but much cleaner edges and lines. If you were to do projects that require masking of any kind, the smoothness of this paper would allow less paint seepage than more textured paper. I’ll have some projects to share in future that will demonstrate what I mean.
To make this color chart, I used one of the papers from the 9″x12″ pad and measured it out (did the math) (sort of) that would let me draw a grid to create a chart of the 144 most basic color combos possible with this paint box. I painted the pure colors in a row along the bottom and again up the left hand side.
Then I mixed each color in the palette with every other color in the palette so that you can see at a glance what two colors it will take to get any particular color shown on the graph. If you follow the row with citrus burst along the left hand side and intersect the column with Frayed Leaf from the bottom, you can see the beautiful shade of olive that produces. And this is just a start! A little more Citrus Burst, with a little less Frayed Leaf will produce a lighter, yellower shade of olive and on and on!
You could do this with any paint palette. It’s kind of mind boggling to see the possibilities. I’m often guilty of thinking I need All. The. Colors. when in fact, I have so many more colors than I even realized!
When I was painting, I tried to fill the little squares with more pigmented color towards the bottom left corner and fading out into the upper right corner. Even seeing the difference a little more water makes to a color is inspiring. If you are intimidated and limited by painting with only the pure colors you have, this is a great way to learn about colors and get more comfortable with how they mix and blend and become the shades they are. And as one teacher told me years ago, the best watercolor shades are the ones left behind in your mixing tray when you were too lazy to clean it out. Never clean out your mixing tray!
I hope this little demonstration has excited you as much as it did me! I have several other paint boxes both from Altenew and other brands, and while I’ll never abandon any one of them, I totally get the “Essential” part of this product label! Your next stop on the hop is Lilith’s blog. Be sure to hit up every one of the participants in this release blog hop as there is just so much to be inspired by!
As well, for 2 days only, you will receive a FREE Watercolor Brush – Large(value $4.99) with every order of Watercolor Essential Set from 3/22/2020 at 12:01 am EDT until 3/23/2020 at 11:59 pm EDT or while supplies last. The free gift will be added to cart automatically.
As usual, to celebrate this release, Altenew is giving away a $30 gift certificate to 5 lucky winners! Please leave a comment on the Altenew Card Blog and/or Altenew Scrapbook Blog for a chance to win. They will also draw a winner to receive a $15 gift certificate from the comments left on each designer’s blog on the blog hop list below. All winners will be announced on the Altenew blogs on Mar 31, 2020.
Blog Hop List:
Norine Borys – You are here.
