Valentine Watercolour

 

I’ve been painting this week; a Valentine’s card for Mr L and an actual picture! There are some wonderful YouTube tutorials available for beginner painters and I’m a big fan of Karen Rice’s paintings, style and teaching.

My card was a line and wash using another Anita Jeram stamp.  Those rabbits are so cute! I lifted out the paint in the sky to create the heart shaped clouds.

When I die cut the panel, I had to use the partial die cutting technique and the die marked the panel so I had to add the ribbon, which unfortunately hides most of the cloud. 

I decorated the envelope using a white gel pen.

My painting was done following Karen Rice’s Silver Birch Trees Step By Step video.  I was first drawn to this particular tutorial because there’s no drawing involved.  The trees are masked using strips of tape (I used framing tape) and then the first stage of painting is done over the top. 

There are some fun techniques to try during the painting.  Here’s a close up of the salt starting to do it’s magic, creating the spidery textures, and the grasses created by scraping the paint with the corner of a plastic card.

Once the paint had dried, I brushed off the salt and added some spatters in white and yellow for impressions of wild flowers.  When this was dry, I removed the tape to reveal my trees.

The next stage was to bring the trees to life.  First, the dark marks on the trunks were added in a random pattern, which I found is actually harder than it seems. When they were dry, I added the shadows to the right side of the trunks to indicate that the light is coming from the left.  I inadvertently did some dry brush technique, which really helped to add texture to the trunks. The last task was to add some grasses to soften the hard edges at the bottom of the trunks.  

I really enjoyed doing this painting and trying out the fun techniques along the way.