Create Autumn Greeting Cards: Watercolor Techniques for Cardmaking

Learn how to make autumn themed greeting cards and use watercolours to create beautiful backgrounds and color focal points. Cards are a wonderful way to connect with friends and family, receiving a handmade card in the mail will be sure be brighten someone’s day and making the cards is a creative and enjoyable process.

Card making often involves lots of different supplies and techniques and so to keep things manageable in today’s class we’ll be looking at using watercolour as the main supply to create three-dimensional greeting cards. In this class we’re be working with a warm autumn themed colour palette and I’ll be looking at three different watercolor techniques for creating your own backgrounds for the cards and three ways to color the nature elements I’ll be using as focal points. While these cards in the class are autumn inspired, you can easy adapt the colours and motifs to create cards for any occasion and time of year. I’ll also be walking you through how I approach card making and I’ll talk about the anatomy of the greeting card and how to break it up into layers and sections. After we’ve worked on creating the backgrounds and foreground elements, I’ll put each of the three cards together and talk about the different design decision that go into construction. We’ll also use a few embellishments, such as buttons, ribbon and wooded shapes, to add extra dimension and interest to the cards.

This class is suitable for beginners as well as more experienced creatives wanting to explore card making and watercolor. You can take the watercolor techniques, tips and process discussed in this class and apply them to your own cards and designs. I’ve been creating and designing my own cards for years and found card making to be an enjoyable and rewarding project. As much fun to make as is it to send them off to friends and family.

What You Will Learn

I’ll be walking you through every step of the process and you'll learn about: 

• Three different watercolor techniques for creating backgrounds: wet into wet wash, acrylic block stamping and creating simple patterns using a paintbrush
• Three ways to approach coloring focal points with watercolors: gradients, wet into wet and color blocking
• How to build up layers and dimension on greeting cards
• Tips for card construction, design layout and ideas for embellishments

You can take the techniques learnt in this class to create watercolor based cards for every occasion and other crafty projects as well. 

Materials You Will Need

Here's a general list of supplies I’ll be using in this class however please feel free to use whatever materials you have at home.

• Card Bases – this class uses three for the sample cards, one 6x6 inch (15x15cm) and two A6 (10.5x14.8cm)
• Watercolor paper – 300gm (hot or cold press). The class uses 4 background panels to create the sample cards – 1x 6x6 inch (15x15cm) and 2x A6 (10.5x14.8cm)
• Watercolor paint set – any brand will work perfectly.
• Brushes – a flat and round
• 2 cups of water
• Masking tape and a board to tape down the watercolor paper.
• Colored cardstock – the class uses a pad of 6x6 inch neutral colors
• Double sided tape and/or liquid glue
• Acrylic block - you can use any thing flat and made from plastic, acrylic or porcelain as a substite 
• 3D foam squares
• Scissors
• Posca white paint pen or white gel pen
• Black stamping ink – the class uses ranger archival
• Text stamps or stickers – you can also hand written your sentiments if you’d prefer
• Embellishments -  nuvo crystal drops (class uses buttermilk and antique rose), buttons, ribbon, wooden chipboard elements. You can also find anything else you have around, fabric scraps, sequins, stickers, magazine cut-outs, brands, paper flowers, wrapping paper etc
• A bone folder is also useful

I hope you’ll join me for this class and create your own autumn themed greeting cards and enjoy playing around with watercolors. If you have any questions or comments then feel free to reach out and let me know, I’m here to help and make sure to share your project photos with the rest of the class and now let’s get started.