Watercolor Greeting Cards Using Cricut Pens

Looking for ideas for making cards using your Cricut machine? Check out these flower-filled summer note cards - drawn by Cricut but hand painted by you! Cricut gel pens create a perfect background for loose and easy watercolor painting.

• Watercolor paper, 140 lb.
• Inexpensive watercolor paint set
• Cricut pens
• Card base or 10x7 inch cardstock for a card base, your choice of colors
• Glue or tape runner

Create a floral design in Cricut Design Space. You can combine any assortment of flower and leaf drawing designs from Cricut Access or upload your own design. I’m using a free seamless floral pattern design I found on Pixabay.

Make the project using heavy watercolor paper. I used a light gray Cricut gel pen to make my project. I like the gel pens for use with watercolor because they do not run when contacted by water or paint.

Using watercolor paint, paint loosely using the drawn lines as a guide. Use your favorite colors, and allow the colors to mix a bit on the paper. The color mixing and imperfect paint application gives the painting interest and helps to keep it from looking like a paint by number project. Color in the entire watercolor sheet and allow it to dry.

Using a loose sketching motion, roughly outline the painted shapes using a black marking pen.

Cut or tear the watercolor painting into pieces measuring 3x7 inches. You’ll be adding one painted piece to the front of each card.

Return to Cricut Design Space to create a small tag for the front of your card. Add a 2 inch circle to your canvas and create a text message to fit. Make the project using a black Cricut pen on watercolor paper. Color in the text message using the black pen.

Adhere the painting to the top of a 5x7 inch card using your favorite paper adhesive. Adhere the tag on top as shown in the image below.

As always, you can take this basic project and extend it to a more elaborate card. Here are a few “fancier” examples, still using strips from a water-color painted sheet of paper, but also layered with additional papers and accented by a wood tag featuring an iron-on message. How will you take this technique and make it your own?