Sunshine Stamper

I recently started working on the Crafting 101 Watercolor Tubes class from the Altenew Academy and it’s been an adventure for me.

I never really tried watercoloring until earlier this month when I tried some cheap supplies I picked up at Five Below. For a palette, I was using a floral plate I picked up at the dollar store.

I found I really enjoyed painting the stamps with the watercolors and it was really relaxing to me. I could color for an hour and would really feel flow and it would only feel like minutes.

My very first creations are above. I don’t think I did a very good job blending the colors and I was not very sure of which colors to use together. I watched quite a few videos on blending paints, setting up a palette and basic techniques.

I felt like my first creations were still a bit flat and one-dimensional, so I started the Altenew class and watched some YouTube videos by my favorite Altenew person, Jaycee.

The card above I created after watching lesson one in the Altenew class. The flowers are actually colored pencil blended with gamsol and I don’t want to talk about how long I spent on them. It took me over an hour to do the first few minutes of the video and I stopped and rewatched several times to follow along with the instructor. I wish they would take more time to explain how they are doing things and why in these classes.

This is the project from lesson two- this one took me several hours to complete. Again, I had to keep stopping and rewatching the video to figure out what the instructor was doing.

The Altenew course is free on their website, so I don’t want to be overly critical, but it didn’t feel like the course was cohesively organized and for a 101 course, the instructor seemed to assume everyone following along would find the techniques as easy and natural as she did. I learned a lot, but it took effort to learn. I think if they had started the video with very basic items, like mixing paint from the watercolor tubes, brush strokes, and an explanation of why shading works the way it does it would have been easier to follow along.

That being said, I learned a lot from the course even if I was on the struggle bus. I cannot believe I created the watercolor panel above- I don’t even want to cut it up to use as a card. I have it displayed on a little easel in my craft room currently. I am loving the Altenew courses and you really can’t beat free especially when you end up creating things that look like little works of art.