Watercolor Failure!

It turns out that I really like the look of spatter paint as a background in watercolor.  I have enjoyed making little panels then turning them into a card with something on top of the spatter.  It occurred to me that if I got a small sieve I could make better spatters.  Wrong!!  At least the first effort turned out to be a bust.

This little sieve I found at Dollar Tree.  The brush is a 3/4-inch oval wash Majesty by Royal and Langnickel.  The paper is Artist's Loft watercolor.

This is what I did--so others will know what not to do.

First I wet the brush in good shape then put lots of water into the red paint cake in the palette.  I picked up a good bit of water and brushed it across the sieve. INSTANT BLOBS of red.   Since that was not what I was going for but thought I could perhaps use them as flowers I let them be then tried tapping the handle of the brush against the metal ring on the sieve.  That DID give me the desired spatters.  Worked great.

So I tried with the blue.  I meant to just do the splatter but I had too much watery paint on the brush and it just dropped right through the sieve onto the paper.  More blobs, blue this time.  Still, I did a little spatter.

OK, I wanted to try the yellow since I am all about the primaries.  I washed the brush again, dropped water into the yellow cake then picked it up. ONCE AGAIN instant blobs, but they came out green since they mostly fell on the blue blobs.  R-r-r-r!  Not what I was looking for.  I did the tapping again and did get more spatter but this was also almost green.  Must be the brush was not completely cleaned from the blue.  Oh well.

Now I had seven large blobs of paint.  I thought perhaps if I took a wadded up paper towel I could pick up some of the blob.  Well, yes, I could, BUT rather than improving things,  the central red, blue, and yellow blobs flowed together instead of up into the towel.  Not really that pleasing a look...unless you like granulating colors.  Well, on second look now that the paint is much more dry, it is a little more interesting.  I will probably use it.

There is much to learn, isn't there?!  In every field of endeavor.

Spatter Paint Cards with Additions!

Since I am participating in a drawing class by Lindsay Weirich over the internet I have decided I am brave enough to do some actual drawing.  And show it publicly.  The idea is that if I learn to draw decently then I will paint better.  This is my hope.

Since I have next to no shame, I am showing what I have come up with so far on this card project.

The first picture is my practice run.

Yes, I know they look like first grader art, but I am brave and giving it a try.

Here are the card fronts.

It is obvious that the trial train was better than the card train but I have not learned the art of erasing so as to leave something good behind so I will just send it anyway.

The tree kind of tickles me.  It is supposed to be a sort of gnarly old tree in the winter time since it actually IS winter. And the recipient is moving in the second half of life this year.  One could pretend that the spatter was a snowstorm with flakes tumbling down.

The card front in the background is a sled hockey player, in case you cannot tell.  This particular sled hockey athlete scored one or more points in a recent tournament!!  So happy for him.

Mission Crafting: Spatter Paint

With three birthdays coming up soon, I had to get rolling on birthday cards.  One idea I had gotten from M did not look like it was going to be ready in time so I concentrated on the front of the cards. and will probably just write a note inside.

Watercolor painting is a multi-step project I have learned.  We had a meeting in the middle of the afternoon after Church so I did the spatter painting before we went to the meeting to give the pictures a chance to dry completely before the next step.

This is what it looked like:

These are the cards I will use for background.  The paper is Strathmore and the paints are Winsor and Newton which came in a darling little paintbox with 14 colors and a paintbrush and tiny pan for water.  There are also several mixing areas but I did no mixing today.  I started spattering with red, then yellow, then blue, finally I added some sap green because I really love sap green!

We shall see what I decide to add to the spatters.