Watercoloring with Hot Foil!

Hot foil is one of the hottest new trends in the paper crafting industry, and watercolor is one of the most enduring. Why not combine them? Emily Midgett here to share a project using both techniques to create this vivid, pink and gold card!

I don't have space to keep my hot foiling machine out on my desk all the time, so when I am going to do some foiling, I assemble several different types of cardstock and hot foil colors and create lots of foiled pieces to save for a rainy day!

With the beautiful Vibrant Florals Hot Foil Plate, I knew I wanted to apply different coloring methods to it in the future, so I hot foiled on alcohol marker-friendly white cardstock as well as Watercolor Cardstock, using a variety of different colors so that I would have lots of options for later.

The Watercolor Cardstock from Altenew foils beautifully because it's so smooth!

How to Make a Watercolor Card with Hot Foil Plates

To start my project for today, I taped down my hot foiled watercolor panel to my watercoloring board to reduce warping. I used the Spring Garden Watercolor Brush Markers to add lots of vibrant colors to the image.

Watercoloring over a hot foiled image is fun, and if you get a little overzealous with your watercolor and get some on the foil itself, a thirsty paintbrush will pull that color up very easily!

TIP! I have found that I get the best control over the color saturation with watercolor brush markers by scribbling the color on a ceramic palette, then picking that color up with a damp paintbrush and applying it to the watercolor paper. Putting the marker directly to the paper makes the color extremely vibrant and saturated, so the method that you choose to use just depends on whether you want a softer look or a super intense, vibrant color scheme.

After I had finished watercoloring, I left my panel taped to my watercolor board so that it would dry nice and flat and turned my attention to the greeting.

I heat embossed the large Bold You sentiment on vellum and sentiment strip on white cardstock using gold glitter embossing powder, then cut the “you” out with coordinating dies.

I like to mix metallic textures; if I have gold foil, I will try to use gold glitter or matte gold accents to keep things interesting. I am particular enough that if I use one shade of foil and want to add another element of gold foil, I want it to be the exact same shade. If I can't do that, then it's time to change things up with a different metallic texture!

Once my watercolor panel was completely dry, I used a blending brush to blend some Rubellite ink around the edges of the panel. I contemplated adding a watercolor halo around the edge, but decided that the softer blended look would highlight the watercoloring better by leaving a subtle halo of white around the watercolored image. I popped the greeting pieces up with some Instant Dimension Foam Tape, then added a few metallic gold pearls for one final metallic accent.

Well, that's all for my hot foil card project today! Thanks so much for reading, and have a marvelous day!

~Supply List~