Beyond Basic Backgrounds

The dawn of a new year means that I’m going to try and get more organised. One of my goals is to work more on my Altenew Educator Program Level 2. So I started the first class ‘Beyond Basic Backgrounds‘ by Lydia Evans. The tutor has a lovely style of presenting, being both informative and interesting.

The card that I thought was the best I created was from lesson 5 and used the technique of water bleaching. This is a fun, and potentially slightly messy technique.

First, you ink blend the background with colours of your choice. I used Distress inks as recommended by the tutor. I chose a green themed background. The interesting thing about creating the backgrounds was that this was only the second time that I had used the new blending brushes from Altenew. This made covering large areas so much easier and quicker than normal ink blending pads.

I used the Altenew Golden Feather stamp set with the We R Memory Keepers Precision Press. This was so that I could re-stamp the image if necessary. Using water instead of ink, I stamped the feather stamp at different angles. I was quite impressed with the kind of image it created. (My husband even asked where I got the feathers from to stamp with, as he thought I had used real ones when he saw the finished card.)

I added some water spray for added texture to the background. While waiting for it to dry I stamped the sentiment. I used Altenew Jet Black ink, and a lovely sentiment from the Altenew A Walk in the Woods stamp set.

A simple black background did not seem to work, and I felt that it needed something more. I added some Nuvo Festival Gold Circles pure sheen confetti to one of the edges to make it a feature. Then after adding the sentiment, I added some more confetti on the card.

When adding the card to the card blank, I decided to leave a little bit of a white mat to the right and bottom of the card. This is to give the card a more dimensional book like look.

I am really happy with how this card turned out.

Card supply list