Monochromatic Floral Anniversary Card featuring Altenew Academy AECP project | DancesWithHooves Paper Design

With a close coworker and friend celebrating her wedding anniversary soon, I wanted to spend some time this weekend creating something special for her to surprise her and her husband on their special day.

Lots of thoughts crossed my mind over the month or so I’ve been contemplating what I would design. Weddings and anniversaries are, to me, “soft” things, yet when designing an anniversary card, I never want to make it too soft – there is a gentlemen involved, after all!

Click below to jump for more pictures and full details on today’s design!

Insert challenges… to the rescue once again!

Last week’s Free For All Challenge was to create something based on the prompt “Flowers.” Well, flowers to me a very love-themed, and very Spring appropriate. So I had a start.

Last year I was accepted into the Altenew Educator Certification Program (AECP) and ended up reaching level 1 certification by last fall. Now, I’m working on level 2! I recently finished their Beautiful Details course, and this card is also my final project for that fun and inspiring class. I was inspired by so many things from the instructor, and was thoroughly impressed by her coloring skills! The monochromatic coloring segment was exactly the final push I needed to try out a concept I’ve been envisioning since reading about Altenew’s 2021 Memorable Monograms Challenge.

And now I had a direction.

But what color should it be? How about the classic color for the well-known March holiday (St. Patrick’s Day); the same day in which the couple’s Anniversary falls: green! To make it softer, I stamped the outline image from the stamp set in Just Jade, then used my Faber Castell colored pencils to softly color the image. I wanted a lot of white space to keep this clean and simple and not overwhelm the star of the show – their monogram, which I both “hid” and featured in the design, by disguising it in the floral design itself yet popping it up and adding a touch of glitter.