The month of December I painted watercolor Christmas cards and I decided to share a few with you. Pick a card you like and consider it my Merry Christmas to You!
If you don’t live where it snows, here are some snowmen enjoying the weather!
I had fun making a bokeh effect for my backgrounds. It’s a simple technique that can be used on cards for any occasion. With stencils of varying size circles, I placed the circle over the dried painted background and used a damp brush to lift off the paint and then dab it with a tissue. If you have a “Magic Eraser” you can use it to remove the paint as an alternative. Just get the eraser wet and wring it out well. Be careful not to rub the paper too hard! The snowflake textures were created using salt on the still damp watercolor, prior to using the bokeh technique.
I also combined stamps and embossing to create fun cards.
Joy to the world, the Lord is come!
May you find peace, joy, and love in Jesus this Christmas.
Have you ever looked at the clouds in the sky and tried to find animals or objects in the shapes of the clouds? Sometimes they just look like clouds and then other times a whole storyline could be made with the images you find.
When I am stuck for ideas on what to paint, sometimes I just lay down color blobs abstractly on the paper. Then I let it dry and turn my paper every which way, trying to see what those blobs want to become. When something jumps out at me, I start adding in details with more paint.
In the photo below, I brushed water on the whole page and then added various streaks and spots of watercolor paint. I slightly tilted the paper to let the watercolor flow a little down the page. It’s fun to see how the paint pigments flow and blend together on the wet paper. After it dried, I initially I saw dancers in the painting. Can you see them?
But after looking a bit longer, I saw iris flowers and started painting in more details. And this is what the abstract blob underpainting became:
That was fun so I tried another painting! In the photo below on the left is my abstract blob underpainting. While the painting was still wet, I wasn’t very excited about the way the colors I had chosen were blending. After it dried though, I could see a little mouse holding a cookie. After adding a few details, my mouse was complete. My granddaughters thought he was adorable!
For this last painting, I got it all finished before realizing that I forgot to take a photo of the initial abstract underpainting. I really did not have to add much to this painting- just some leaves, grass, trunk, and some water ripples. It looks like a very peaceful place to visit.
I find this process to be a fun way to stimulate my imagination and get the creativity flowing. I challenge you to try it!
No matter what skill level you are in your creative endeavors, you can always learn something new from others. I enjoy trying new classes on Skillshare. Not long ago, my granddaughter and I took a class from Mary Evelyn Tucker on Skillshare to learn to paint a cat. Painting animals has been much more intimidating to me, but I am determined to learn. Mary Evelyn is a great artist and wonderful teacher. We learned new techniques and had fun in the process.
I pretty happy with my cat!
Below is my granddaughter’s cat painting:
And the most fun thing about doing this tutorial is that Mary Evelyn has a studio not far from us and we got to visit her studio!
Check out Mary Evelyn’s class called: Watercolor- Let’s Paint a Cat! on Skillshare.
Just to show you how much we learned from her….here is a picture of the paintings we did last fall of a sweet cat we had with us for a short amount of time. We plan to try doing paintings of her again after what we have learned! Mine is on the left and my granddaughter’s is on the right.
A few days ago we took the first part of another class on Skillshare from Cat Coquillette called: Painting Fruits & Florals in Watercolor with a Modern Twist. The first lesson was to paint a watermelon, hibiscus flower and banana leaf, learning how to simplify a reference photo image.
This is my painting:
I found an image of an ice cream cone with chocolate ice cream and decided to try Cat’s techniques on a painting of an ice cream cone. Only I like mint chocolate chip better, so made my own ice cream!
My granddaughter finished her lesson and decided to try her own composition of fruits on her own:
We plan to try the rest of the lessons in Cat’s class on Painting Fruits & Florals in Watercolor with a Modern Twist in our next painting session together.
Check out Skillshare and see what new skills you can learn. I have a class on there as well you might enjoy called Watercolor: Stain Glass Inspired Painting! Use this link for a free trial!
“Happiness is to hold flowers in both hands”. – Japanese proverb
Happiness is to hold a camera to take photos of beautiful flowers!
Happiness is is to hold a brush to paint those beautiful flowers!
If you have flowers, you have no lack of inspiration for creativity. I love taking photos of flowers in my garden and trying to create a painting of what I see. Daisies have always been a favorite flower of mine- I even had them in my winter wedding! Where I live the daisies grow wild on the sides of many roads sometime in early May. Just driving past them makes my heart sing. I do have a few growing in my garden now, but in May, I stopped to pick some at the side of a country road.
These became my inspiration for doing some negative painting. I started out wetting the whole paper and laying down some splotches of light blue watercolor, leaving some areas for the white daisies (left). After that dried, I began painting darker blue around the flowers (right). It’s much easier to think in terms of painting the flowers themselves than it is to “not” paint the flowers but paint the space that is around them. I need to practice more negative painting! I also did not want to draw the flowers in beforehand because I did not want pencil marks.
I added in lots more color and some splatters and this is what I finished with:
The kids gave me a calla lily for Mother’s Day. While getting ready to transplant it, I decided it was a candidate for a painting.
I zoomed in on a small portion of the flowers and made that the focus of a large painting.
For several years I have planted lantana flowers in my yard because the deer do not seem to like eating them! I have to be careful what I plant. These plants fascinate me with the variety of flower arrangements on a single plant! Each flower is only about an inch across with lots of tiny little parts. I focused in close on this one for inspiration of a recent painting.
And this was my painting:
Painting a vase of flowers is nice, but sometimes it’s more fun to focus on a small part of a plant and let that be the inspiration for a painting much larger than the original plant. I have SO many photos of flowers in my camera I won’t run out of possibilities! Do you like to paint flowers? What draws your eye the most- the whole plant or the intricate details?
One of my granddaughter’s celebrated a recent birthday by getting her ears pierced. She can’t wait to collect an assortment of fun earrings to accessorize her outfits. The potential of a collection of earrings means she needs a place to store the ones NOT currently on her ears! This gave me an opportunity to be creative.
She lives in a place with not much room to have “pretty things” sitting around, so I decided to purchase a wooden framed hanging board for the earring holder. It will take up wall space instead. She loves all things unicorn and this little wooden unicorn jumped into my shopping cart as well.
I drew out the design I wanted on a piece of newsprint and my husband drilled little holes into the wooden board for me. I painted a background of purples and pinks in metallic shimmery paint. The hanger beads were tied onto the frame with string, so I took them off and rigged up a contraption to hold the beads while I painted them. I shaped a wire clothes hanger in such a way that the beads would be separated into the three colors I wanted to paint them. After stringing the beads on, I stuck the ends into a piece of styrofoam to hold the wire in place. I did have to use a toothpick inserted at an angle into the hole of each bead to help hold the bead still while I painted it. It worked!
I painted a line through my swirled background from which to “hang” the earrings. Each set of holes was painted with hearts or stars. Though it doesn’t show well in the pictures, everything was painted over with shimmery glitter paint. My granddaughter loves sparkles! The wooden unicorn was painted in similar colors with lots of sparkles. I tied variegated colored crochet thread into bows and glued them in place to “hang” the stars and heart shapes from. I also put a dab of Fray-Check onto each thread end to keep the thread from fraying.
Rather than permanently gluing the unicorn to the board, I put magnets on the back side of the unicorn and on the board. This way she can take the unicorn off to play with.
And here is what the finished unicorn earring holder looks like:
The knot in this tree caught my eye- so many interesting textures! I knew I had to try painting it. Turing the photo sideways, I thought I could get a more abstract look. Upon completion of the painting, I’m not sure I loosened up into more abstraction. But if you hadn’t seen the original photo, would you think of a tree trunk? I had fun with it though and that’s what counts! Are you looking at nature in new ways for inspiration for your creativity?
Nature is a source of inspiration for artists all over the world. I love to take pictures of interesting textures, either natural or man-made. Not long ago I took a Skillshare course from Rosalie Haizlett called “Painting Natural Textures with Watercolor.” Following along with her instructions and a photo of a stream with rocks under the water she used for inspiration, this is the abstract painting I created:
That was so much fun I decided to pull out a photo I’d taken of fungus growing on the bark of a tree in my yard. So many lovely textures to try to recreate in abstract!
And from this photo I created the following watercolor abstract using colors I love:
I gave my painting buddy an old phone of mine and let her take photos in the yard of textures in nature she found interesting. She chose one she liked best of a rock with lots of texture variation and started painting her abstract.
Look at the many vibrant colors and techniques she used to create her painting!
Painting in abstract is hard for me as I tend to want to make things look as realistic as possible. Using texture filled nature images helps me to loosen up a bit, but I need lots more practice! Good thing there is an abundance of nature out there to inspire me! If you need inspiration for your creations, take a walk, and snap closeup photos of textures and shapes that attract you. Then go home and paint, or draw, or sew, or….
Skillshare is a great place to get inspired, learn new skills and increase your creativity. Click this link to try out Skillshare for free for 14 days! You will have access to my Stained Glass Inspired Watercolor Painting class as well as thousands of other classes on various topics.
I know I’m not alone —most of the people living on my continent were plunged into the deep freeze in the past couple weeks. While trying to keep warm, it would probably have been more uplifting to paint spring flowers, however, it seemed more fitting to the occasion to paint an ice picture.
Here’s a photo I took a few weeks ago after a night of rain and then freezing temperatures. The ice that formed in the ditch had very unique shapes and textures and I snapped a photo to capture it.
So last week, while contemplating painting snow or ice, I pulled up this photo and played around with cropping it in various places to see what design caught my eye. I intended to do some kind of abstract using the design chosen. Here is the portion I decided upon:
Upon closer inspection after blowing up the selected portion of the photo, I saw so many wonderful textures.
So instead of painting an abstract, I tried to capture as much of the texture as I could using watercolor paint. I used colors that made it look much colder than the photo does— more in keeping with the temperatures we experienced the past couple weeks!
I probably won’t hang this on the wall, as I’d much rather be reminded of warm times, but it was a fun study in texture painting!
“Who can add to Christmas? The perfect motive is that God so loved the world. The perfect gift is that He gave His only Son. The only requirement is to believe in Him. The reward of faith is that you shall have everlasting life.” – Corrie Ten Boom
As the year 2020 comes to a close, we have so many things to reflect on from the craziness of the year. Hopefully, for all of us, that includes: • appreciating our families and friends more than ever before • realizing we don’t need as many “things” as we thought to live life • learning how to take better care of our health • growing in faith • developing our creativity • and so much more.
My posts this year have been few and far between, but we are doing well, staying healthy, and been busy on a family building project. You might hear more on that to come! I pray that all of you have a blessed Christmas and can step into the New Year with hope.
“Now may God, the inspiration and fountain of hope, fill you to overflowing with uncontainable joy and perfect peace as you trust in him. And may the power of the Holy Spirit continually surround your life with his super-abundance until you radiate with hope!” Romans 15:13
How do you know if you are growing your creative skills in a particular area? One of the best ways would be to take a look back at some of your earlier work. Can you see areas where you have made improvements? Is your technique changing? Does your work seems to have more depth and life to it now compared to then? Remember you are comparing your work to your work — not your work to someone else’s work!
Almost two years ago, I did a watercolor tutorial from a book by Shirley Trevena, titled Taking Risks With Watercolor. I love texture in watercolor and her style intrigued me. I enjoyed following her instructions giving me a sneak peak into how she produces her works.
Taking Risks with Watercolor by Shirley Trevena
This was the painting I made from her tutorial in Sept 2018:
I was pretty proud of it and learned so much from Shirley. However the painting has been in a drawer all this time and I had not looked at it for a long time. Last week I thought about that tutorial and decided it would be fun and insightful to do that tutorial again to see how much I’ve improved. While painting, I was tempted many times to dig out the previous painting to see what I had done before, but I kept it hidden in the drawer so it would not in any way influence the current painting. I couldn’t even remember what size paper I had used the first time! (I did end up using larger paper for my current painting.) The tutorial was a bit easier to follow this time because I have used many of the techniques over the past couple years.
So this is my just completed painting from the tutorial:
I do feel that the second one was an improvement and can see so much that I’ve learned. Have you gone back to a tutorial or class you took a fews years ago to try it again? I encourage you to do so!
