Altenew November Challenge and Inkspirational Challenge #69 -Shine

Good Afternoon everyone!

This is my entry to the Altenew November Challenge
and to the Inkspirational Challenge #69.
This card was one of the top picks at the Inspirational.

This is a card for my husband's friend who is getting his doctoral thesis today and my husband needed a congratulation card for him. In my opinion, masculine cards are really hard to do and I find it more hard to do a masculine card for a special occasion like this. So, I went for blogland to get inspiration. I saw the November Challenge at Altenew and was really drawn to those metallic embellishments but  thought that silver would be more masculine rather than gold. I chose to play with this Persian Motifs stamp set from Altenew since I think this would make a really elegant card since the flowers are so beautiful. But I couldn't possibly colour these gorgeous flowers in red for a man... so I thought why not to colour them monochromatic black! Would that be cool and masculine?!? But the card needed something "it" to be something special. Search continued. For the past week I've had in mind this challenge at the Inkspirational where the theme for this fortnight is Shine! I love the theme, I just couldn't get the idea until now! The little shine is the thing that this idea was short of. So there is the inspiration for this card.

I started stamping the Persian Motifs with Black Soot Distress ink. I didn't want the black outlines to show so I think it was the forth generation stamping which ended to the card base. I coloured the flowers with Black Soot Distress Ink as well. To get the shine I added Perfect Pearls to the water.  I heat embossed the silver edge on to a scrap watercolour paper to get some masculine texture to it. For the finishing touch I added some black dots with a black marker. Here is the close-up where the shine/shimmer from the perfect pearls is seen better.

Close-up where the perfect pearl shine is seen better.

Here are the challenges' graphics:

Thank you for stopping by today. I really had such a fun time watercolouring these and I am really pleased with the outcome. Hopefully you like them also! Have a wonderful day! 

Marika