Video: Foiled Watercoloured Christmas Card with Debby Hughes for Spellbinders featuring Merry Christmas Banner Glimmer Hot Foil Plate Holiday 2019
Cardmaking,  Glimmer Hot Foil,  Video Tutorials

Video: Foiled Watercoloured Christmas Card with Debby Hughes

Hi, this is Debby from Lime Doodle Design, and I’m delighted to be here at Spellbinders today. The new Holiday Glimmer Hot Foil release is already out, and I am having such fun adding all the glimmer and shine to my projects. Usually when I add glimmer foil I do so onto a smooth card; however, I love to watercolour at every opportunity, and so today I’d like to take you along my journey experimenting with adding foil to watercolour card, and I’ll be using the new and oh so beautiful Merry Christmas Glimmer Hot Foil plate to do so.

VIDEO TUTORIAL

Watch the video tutorial below or on YouTube to learn how to make this project:

FOIL OVER WATERCOLOUR

I like to use Arches watercolour card, and there are three textures in their 140lb weight range – Rough as the name suggests is the roughest most textured surface, cold-pressed has some texture, and then hot-pressed is smooth. Each of the three is the same 140lb weight, but I wondered whether the texture would make a difference as to how much impression the plate would make in the card. I love letterpress, and the letterpress effect of these plates is a bonus to their ability to add foil. So, starting I cut a square of each card just slightly larger than the Merry Christmas plate. I aligned the plate on the hot foil system base plate without heating it first. I then prepared the sandwich of Thin Shim and Spacer Pad, but I added some extra white card in too. It will depend on your machine as to whether you need the additional card or not. I then taped these pieces together and ran everything thing through the Platinum 6 to impress the plate into the card. I did this for each of the three textures.

The hot-pressed card is smooth in texture, and although the outside edges of the plate showed a nice impression, the detail of the centre of the plate was lost. If I wanted to use this card, I would need to increase the pressure in the sandwich, I think. With the lightly textured cold-pressed card you are getting a beautiful deep impression, as it turns out you do with the rough textured card too. I find it interesting that each of the cards has the same weight, and yet the impression achieved varies significantly with the two textured samples compared to the smooth one. Eliminating the hot-pressed card and comparing just the cold-pressed and rough samples and there wasn’t a massive difference. However, seeing as I had the rough card, I decided I may as well go with that option. My only concern with this very textured card is whether I’d get lots of over foiling. Over foiling is where the foil catches on areas it is not intended to.

Video: Foiled Watercoloured Christmas Card with Debby Hughes for Spellbinders featuring Merry Christmas Banner Glimmer Hot Foil Plate Holiday 2019

I cut a piece of the Arches Rough card to be slightly larger than an A2 card base. This gives me room to tape the card to a board to prevent warping when adding lots of water and also allows for a little wiggle room when trimming the panel down to fit a card front. I then took a broad brush and added a wash of clean, clear water over the whole panel. The paint I used is Blue Apatite Genuine from Daniel Smith. It is a beautiful granulating dusky blue colour. Granulation is when the pigment within the paint settles in the valleys of the surface texture and seeing as I’m using the most textured card of my three initial samples then I anticipated some excellent granulation. Not every paint granulates and for that matter, not everyone likes granulation, but for me, it adds extra texture and interest and is just another feature of watercolour that I love.

One of my favourite ways to add interest to watercolour is to splatter over the top, and one of my favourite things to splatter is a mix of Perfect Pearls and water. To make the mix, I take a palette knife and add a few scoops of Perfect Pearls powder to a Mini Mister, and then I use a pipette to add water to the powder until the bottle is about three-quarters full. I give it a good shake and then use the tube from the bottle to splatter the sparkly mixture over the watercoloured background. This adds sparkle, but for lovely white opaque highlights, stars, snow etc. my go-to is Permanent White Gouache from Winsor & Newton. I mixed a dot of this with just a tiny bit of water on my brush and then splattered the mixture over the background too.

Video: Foiled Watercoloured Christmas Card with Debby Hughes for Spellbinders featuring Merry Christmas Banner Glimmer Hot Foil Plate Holiday 2019

The advantage of the Glimmer Hot Foil System is that the base plate has a grid on it which means that once I worked out where I wanted the foil on my card I could measure the gap to the top of the card and then align the plate on the base and then centre and align my card over the top with the required distance. Silver and blue are always a great combination, and so I picked out the Silver foil and cut it to size to fit over the Merry Christmas Glimmer Hot Foil Plate. I trimmed off the excess foil to help prevent over foiling and then laid the foil over the plate shiny side down followed by the watercoloured panel again watercolour side down. I had the base plate clicked into the machine and heating up already and the Platform Ready light was lit green and so I pressed the timer button and added the rest of the sandwich ready for running through the Platinum 6 and then waited for the flashing timer light to turn a solid green. I then unclicked the base plate from the machine and ran the sandwich through the Platinum 6.

And the moment of truth … there was some lovely foiling going on with the Merry Christmas design but there was some over-foiling. This could be due to the texture of the card or that I made the sandwich too tight with the added card to get the lovely deep impression of the plate on the watercolour card. Either way, it didn’t matter as I’ve found over-foiling to be an easy thing to fix with a Tombow Mono Sand Eraser. This gritty eraser gently rubs off the surface, and when rubbed over the areas of excess foil, the foil lifts so quickly it’s almost as if it isn’t stuck. Working around detailed regions of the foiled design is not too much of a worry either because the main design is pressed into the card and therefore sits at a lower level than the over-foiling around it. The eraser skims over the debossed areas and so only removes the excess foil.

Video: Foiled Watercoloured Christmas Card with Debby Hughes for Spellbinders featuring Merry Christmas Banner Glimmer Hot Foil Plate Holiday 2019

I trimmed the panel down to be slightly smaller than an A2 card base, and I have to say I loved this just as it was, and I can easily see myself setting up a system to create multiples of this card. However, I do like to add dimension when I can, and the new Ornament Glimmer Hot Foil set has beautifully detailed foliage dies. Watch out for a card I made with this set that I’ll be sharing on my blog soon – the Ornament foiled and then paired with the dies is gorgeous. I wanted to keep this card to a simple, blue, silver and white colour scheme and so I cut the detailed dies out of Ivory card to tone with the off-white of the watercolour card. I die cut a whole bunch of the detailed dies to create a border along the top of the card, but in the end, I preferred the pared-back version with just a trio of pine branches sticking out over one corner. I added a few sequins, gems and droplets to embellish and then added foam adhesive tape to the back of the panel and adhered to a card base cut and scored from Ivory card.

And so there you have it, the lovely Merry Christmas Glimmer Hot Foil plate silver foiled over a watercoloured background. I do love the look of this, the deep impression of the foil on the textured background and yes, there was some over-foiling, but it wasn’t a problem and took just a moment to fix.

Spellbinders Supplies:

OTHER SUPPLIES

Arches hot-pressed, cold-pressed and rough watercolour card; Daniel Smith Blue Apatite Genuine watercolour; Tombow Mono sand eraser; Ranger Perfect Pearls; Ranger palette knife; Mini Mister; Winsor & Newton Permanent White gouache; Simon Says Stamp Ivory card; Tonic Nuvo Crystal Gems; Tonic Nuvo Duck Egg Blue crystal drops; Little Things From Lucy’s Cards Enchanting sequin mix

I want to thank you for joining me today, and if you want to see more from me, then please pop on over to my blog Lime Doodle Design where you will find regular blog posts from me as well as links to all the usual social media channels.

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