Paintbrush Pot

Spurred on by the results of my creative cans upcycling project a couple of weeks ago, I thought I’d do a similar thing for my paintbrush pot, which started out life housing pork scratchings!  It was a first outing for the stamp set, Colorado Craft Company’s Color My World from their Big & Bold range, which was part of my COTY2022 prize.  I was inspired by this fantastic card by My Love For Paper, who also has a great video demonstrating her colouring.

My colouring skills are not a patch on hers and I doubted that I could make the brushes look that realistic so I went for black stamped and clear heat-embossed lines rather than the no-line look on her card.  The panel is 14cm x 36 cm, long enough to wrap around my pot.

To begin, I coloured the handles and ferrules using alcohol markers.  I realise the irony of colouring paintbrushes with markers and pencils but I didn’t have any watercolour paper that was long enough.

Next, to add more definition, I went back over the coloured areas using coloured pencils.  The card I used was a linen effect and, although I used the back, some of the texture showed with the pencils but I think that added to the overall finish.

The final colouring was to add the bristles and rainbow paints, again using markers to start and finishing with my Faber-Castell Polychromos pencils.  I also added a slight grey shadow on the right of each brush  

After trimming 2cm from the top of the panel (as I’d mistakenly cut it at 14cm rather than 12cm), I then attached it to the pot using red-liner tape.

I’m so pleased with how it turned out.

After photographing this, I decided to wrap some self-adhesive film over the top to protect it from any inadvertent splashes.