watercolour play

[Keitha]

A technique from Altenew, to loosely watercolour a starry sky and then die-cut flowers from it when dry. The palm trees seem incongruous, but watercolour was a challenge at my tropical event.

[pamcook]

Stunning!

[mpizzazz]

Wow, those flowers are gorgeous!
Did you emboss the edges or is that gold marker or ???

[jmp1022]

Beautiful

[Keitha]

Thanks ladies. Marianne, I edged the flower pieces with gold ink to make them show up a bit better. I have the Vicki Boutin metallics color wheel, so it was easier to get the wedge of ink into tight spaces. That ink takes forever to dry though.

[katymjo]

These are lovely, Keitha. The blues and gold really show up well on the black background.

[EDelValle]

The flowers are gorgeous!

great challenge to get this result

[nchoney]

That's a great technique!!

[jfugina]

Those flowers are so beautiful!

[pamcook]

I keep returning to look at those flowers. Would you please come to my house to teach me how to do that technique? It's nice and warm here...

[Keitha]

I'd be there in a heartbeat, if travel wasn't so danged impossible right now. This is pretty easy to do. Take a piece of watercolour paper, bigger than you think you need (I used a 9x12 piece), wet it first so the colours blend easily, and slap some darker colours around on it. I kind of pounced my very saturated brush around, adding in some bits of warmer colours (red, yellow, pink) along with the blues and greys. You can always add more water to your paper as you add colour, but you don't want your colours too pale. I just pulled a small 12-colour palette out of my drawer that didn't have a lot of darks on it, but if you've got them, do use indigo, dark violet, dark green, dark grey and even black. The effect you're after is a galaxy/night sky. At this point it will look like a hot mess, and you'll wonder why you wasted your time and paint. Just before you call it done add a few splatters of shimmery watercolour, or splatter some kind of shimmer mist if you don't have metallic w/c. Let it all completely dry. When dry, add a few more shimmery stars; the ones you added while it was wet will somewhat fade/bleed into the background, but the ones on top will stay more defined. Yep, still a pretty hot mess, but this is where the magic happens. Using layering or 3D dies cut out your flowers; I went for the bits I thought looked good and made sure to include bits of the red, etc. and didn't worry about including all the layers. I cut as many as I could and then mixed and matched; I still have a few flowers for another project. Cut your leaves from gold. Inking the edges defines them, and putting them on black really makes them pop.

[nchoney]

I'll put watercolors and paper in my bag to bring in May

I think I'm going to need to start another bag ... LOL

The cool part of this message is that I know exactly where all my paints/brushes/paper are!!!

[pamcook]

I think that I must put too much effort into the coloring part - or not enough color choices. I haven't given up and I appreciate you taking the time to explain it. I'll see if I can find some videos to watch as well.

Yes, Debi - bring them! Sounds like a fun evening group project.