3 Gorgeous Floral Bouquet Handmade Cards and How to Make Them

Hello Altenew friends, it's Norine here with you today!  The Breezy Bouquet Stamp and Die Set is a recent release; a lovely mid-sized floral with multiple options for a finished image.

So I want to share with you today three different ways you can use it.

Let's begin with the bouquet-in-a-jar card.

I wanted to create an uncomplicated watercolor card, so I stamped with both ink pad and water-based markers and did all my “painting” with a wet brush.

First Card

So I began by stamping the floral image in the stamp set first.  I roughly eye-balled where the whole design would fill the panel and then stamped the bouquet.  Because I wanted to just re-activate the pigment from the stamping, and the image has both flowers and leaves, (very different colors) I couldn't ink up the whole stamp with an ink pad, even a mini-sized one.  So I colored on the appropriate parts of the image with a red water-based marker for the blooms, and two different shades of green water-based markers for the leaves.

It would have been difficult to do this technique without the use of a stamping tool such as the MISTI, because I colored just one section of leaves, or one flower bud, stamping each separately and immediately coloring over the stamped lines with a wet brush.  The sooner you add water to the stamped lines, the better, as the watercolor paper absorbs drying ink fairly quickly so it's better to work small sections of the image at a time.  Later, after the initial water blended color was dry, I did go back and deepen a few of the shadows with more of the same color, by smearing the ink pad or the marker onto a palette and picking up the color with a wet paintbrush.

Before stamping the stems and vase, I cut a mask of the bottom portion of the florals and covered the bouquet. I used Aqualicious to stamp the vase and the same green markers for the stems that I'd used for the leaves on top.  As I did with the bouquet, I worked on the vase and stems separately.  Once the whole image was dry, I scribbled more of the marker colors on my palette and used puddles of pale ink-paint to add the background colors.  I used one of the sentiments from the Breezy Bouquet set and completed the card with some platinum glimmer dots that matched the Platinum Embossing Powder used for the sentiment.

Second Card

The second card today is done in the most traditional watercoloring technique. I used the Altenew Watercolor 36 Pan Set and a fine-tipped paintbrush to paint each of the small areas separately.

I wasn't happy with my first attempt at painting that lovely rose, but I liked the rest of the card panel and didn't want to scrap it all for one flawed part.  So I painted another rose on a separate piece of watercolor paper, and happy with it, hand-cut it close to the edges, in a throwback to the Paper Tole craft of the late 1970s! I popped up the rose with foam tape and adhered it overtop the offending rose below and I love the look of extra dimension that gives!

For this card, I used the wrapped-paper stamp image, stamping the bouquet part first and masking it again to add the bottom portion of the image. I painted the whole design with colors from the Altenew paint set and added mixes of all the same paint colors which I'd used for the bouquet to add shadows to the background. I used a sentiment from the Dainty Swiss Dots stamp set and heat embossed, as above, with Platinum embossing powder. Finally, I added paint specks with the same shades of paint I had already used to paint the picture.

Third Card

Lastly, I have a card that uses no paint or coloring of any kind! I positioned the die where I wanted the bouquet to be placed. And then I die cut the shape from the gray-brown cardstock. I stamped a birthday sentiment from the Breezy Bouquet stamp set, and heat embossed it with platinum embossing powder, then placed that die-cut cardstock panel into my MISTI, positioning the stamp exactly in the opening to line up perfectly where it needed to be. Then I removed the cardstock panel with the die-cut opening from the MISTI and replaced it with a cream-colored cardstock base and stamping with Evening Gray ink.
Next, I die cut 3 more layers of cardstock with the opening in the same position and glued them all behind the gray-brown cardstock. (Not sure why I didn't just die cut a single layer from Fun Foam – it would have saved some time.)

Once I had all the layers adhered to the cardstock panel, I could position it exactly over the stamped image on the card base and adhere them together. I added some platinum-colored enamel dots to coordinate with the embossed sentiment, and called this card complete.

Thank you so much for your interest and for stopping by.  If you have any questions, leave them in the comments and I will be sure to respond.  Below are the products I've used today.  Have a wonderful day!

~SUPPLY LIST~

Breezy Bouquet Stamp Set [ ALTN ] Watercolor 36 Pan Set — Altenew [ ALTN ] Watercolor Palette – Medium [ ALTN ] Dainty Swiss Dots Stamp Set [ ALTN ] Platinum Crisp Embossing Powder [ ALTN ] Aqualicious Crisp Dye Ink [ ALTN ]