Let it snow, let it snow, LET IT SNOW!

For Christmas I was inspired to paint a snowman. We decided to take our neighbors Snowman Soup (hot chocolate) for Christmas. My mom found a cute poem online for Snowman Soup and the idea was to put the poem on a recipe card. We had this planned for a while but never talked about the card. The other day I felt like I was going crazy and need to do something and started drawing. The process went very fast so all I have are finished product pics!

Since I was just practicing and relieving stress, I just drew the outline of the snowman and his hat.

Next I added a grayish blue very lightly around the base and sides of the snowman, then my imagination went a little wild. I wanted their to be trees and his hat to have a red bow. Then I thought wouldn't it be cool to add a leaf to one of his branch hands and a bird on the other. I drew the bird, but I free painted the trees. I started very lightly, and added more layers to the ones I wanted to seem closer. The spontaneity of the exercise made this very relaxing and enjoyable. I wasn't expecting a painting! I planned as I went and the purpose was to experiment and improve, what I ended up with was a Christmas card! There are definitely things to improve, I see all the flaws, but I didn't need to toss it out and start over, it was cute enough to use and perfect to grow from.


 Since I decided he was a keeper and he went perfectly with our Snowman Soup idea, my mother and I took the original down to the FedEx Office Store. They have a variety of papers to choose from. We chose a heavy weight semi-gloss paper. They scanned the paining in and we luckily ended up with a very customer service oriented employee who worked with the machine until she got the image and background coloring as close to the original as possible. Here are the results!

She reduced the image by about 50%, which gave us four to a sheet and were the perfect size for what we needed. This is not the first time I have done an original for a card. Office Supply stores are great to work with for printing. In the past I have usually tried two to a sheet for a folded Christmas card. You pay for the paper, I believe the one we chose was $1.24, and we decided to do 6 sheets, so we ended up with 24 cards for less than $8.00! It's never too early to start working on cards! Valentine's is around the corner and it's always someone's birthday somewhere! :)

This Amazing Video is a Must See!

Recently my mother started to "play" with ink and water. The results have been amazing to me and I will be posting her work, which is fabulous, along with my attempt which I will label WIP :)

The first video I am nowhere near attempting, yet, but it is fascinating to watch, if you go no further with this post, DO NOT LEAVE BEFORE WATCHING Mary Doodles paint a wolf in ink!

Mary Doodles has great how-to tutorials which introduce the basics and techniques that can be used for any style of painting. Her style, which I call edgy cartoonish, is amazing but not the direction I take for my artwork.

The second video I am posting is introducing Derwent Inktense Pencils. They are becoming my new favorite thing! 

In Lindsay's post she calls them watercolor pencils but they are actually ink, not watercolor pigment. Ink in a pencil form, who knew? The upside to Inktense is that the colors dry much more vibrantly than watercolor and once the pigment is wet and then dries, it doesn't move again. This means  you can layer the colors with beautiful effects! The downside is once it dries it doesn't move again and they are quite pricey! One way around price is to get them from Michaels with their 50% coupon. For the 24pk the price is $83.00, so you definitely want to use the coupon.

My mother has been studying the works of one of her favorite pen and ink artists, Claudia Nice. She did the below leaf assortment from a study of Claudia's work in her "Creating Textures in Pen&Ink with Watercolor."

 I know, right? I am hoping whatever I am missing from the gene pool I can pick up through osmosis! She started with the sketch, about half the size of the original, and then layered the colors. She used ink pens for much of the veining and texture as well as the gravel beneath the leaves. 

I took a simpler approach for my first Inktense experience. I wanted to do Thanksgiving cards for a few people and was messing around with a pumpkin sketch and decided to use the Inktense pencils. They are done on postcards that have a line and groove texture. Here's how they turned out:

 I was going for a whimsical look, so I extended the stem by writing out Happy Thanksgiving, keeping both words connected and ending it with the curled vine look going down to the stem of the pumpkin.

 I then on dry paper added the yellow base to the pumpkin, then with a wet brush I blended the yellow over the entire pumpkin.

 I used a blow dryer to speed up the process and added some burnt umber"ish" colors and orange.

 I kept layering until I had the depth of color I wanted.

 I went a little too deep in shading the crevices of the pumpkin. I used a burgundy. I did several of these and went lighter on the others.

 This is the finished the pumpkin, as I said earlier, I kept layering the colors until I had the look I wanted. As you can see the base yellow still shines through.

 I then traced over the vine and words with a green Inktense pencil and when that was done, I took a wet liner brush and went over the words. This allowed the Inktense to set and provided some shading.

 I then did some shading underneath the pumpkin. I wanted to incorporate the blue so the orange would pop because that is the effect you get when complimentary colors are placed together. I also included some orange and green. Shadows often have a tint of the colors of the subject they are shadowing!

This is not the same pumpkin I did above but one of the many I did. When I finished them I decided to add a water color background. I did this by spritzing the entire piece and then dropping and blending the color. That was possible because the Inktense stays dry, unlike watercolor that has dried, which would be ruined if rewet. I went right over the wording but I went around the pumpkin. This was one of my favorites. I felt that the blue-gray background allowed all the colors to pop, although it does now look like a pumpkin on a flying carpet! :)

I did it! It turned out much better than I thought it would.

Sorry, the lighting is not great, something I have been working on improving! I recently got a new light, so hopefully for my next post the pictures will be better.








I started by lightly sketching the leaf, including the holes. As I said in my last post, I am not ready for the purely free style of sketching with just the water on my brush!

I then started dropping color, first yellow, then the red and then the blue. This was such a fast process, I did not get pictures of me dropping the color in! I am going to redo this one soon and I promise I will do better about photo journaling the process.


The leaf was very wet by the time I got all the color in so there were puddles of paint, it was great.

I lightly dabbed the larger puddles with a tissue.You can go in with a thirsty (barely damp) brush as well, but sometimes you have more control with a tissue and can prevent smudging.

I did very light blending with my brush, and that was only after the
colors began to merge on their own. You can see the effect leaves
a beautiful feathering of color.

To add the stem and the veining I used a very heavy pigment of the blue and red. I mixed them until I had a maroon color and then I applied it to the leaf. The leaf was still wet, but had dried to a heavy damp and applying a thicker pigment allowed the veining to stay visible but blend in with the rest of the colors.

Here is the original video again. I hope you try it out--it was a blast! Remember, the leaf is the second part of the video!

My next piece is going to be a second attempt of loose wet on wet! My mother has been watching Lian Quan Zhen, a Chinese artist who incorporates Chinese painting with watercolor. He has amazing techniques for both styles!

I have been wanting to paint a leaf ever since fall hit and the leaves started changing. In his Youtube video Lian Quan Zhen, shows techniques through two paintings. For the second painting he shows how to paint a maple leaf and mix the colors with both color dropping as well as brush painting. This is similar to my last post of the apple and cherries. He starts by sketching the leaf with just water.  This piece will be my main focus. I am going to first sketch the leaf with pencil and then go over it with my brush. After that, I will do the piece again, this time sketching the leaf with just my brush. Ambitious? Yes :) The first part of his video I find intimidating, it is very loose, but the technique of blowing the water and softening the edges using your fingers can not be passed by!

For my second post, I chose to follow a simple still life from Andrew Geeson's wet into wet series. I find loose watercolors intimidating so I chose his Apple and Cherry still life as my first effort before I move onto a more difficult subject!

Andrew Geeson does not instruct with commentary, just through paint and example. I prefer verbal instruction but I found myself more attentive to watching each step.

My attempt was a comedy of errors. First, I recommend not being in a hurry when you paint, second clearing your space. I am still not sure quite how it happened but I ended up with paint on the down side of my hand causing smudges on my paper as I rested my hand on the paper to angle my brush.

The purpose of wet into wet is that the paint will only move where water has been. This is a general rule, the exception is if you have too much water it can spill over into dry areas. I sketched out the apple and cherries and followed Andrew's example, applying clean water to the subjects, leaving dry spaces where I did not want paint to go.

 In the future I will sketch the borders of the white spaces I need to leave as it would be less stressful for me to practice the placement and the shape through sketch until I am ready to do it through brush only.

 You can see my smudges on the right of the cherries!

 It was fun to drop the paint into the water and watch the colors move and blend. Loose wet into wet is a very creative and flowing process. If you are a little bit of control freak, expecting instant perfection, this is both a stressful process as well as the perfect process to learn. There is still skill and mastery in the flow.

Learning what you don't like and what didn't work the way you wanted, which is different than what you expected, helps you see what to do or try differently the next time!






The cherries, leaves and the shadowing were done with a liner brush. That is not a brush I am used to working with and need a lot more practice. I wasn't thrilled with the shadow outcome, I wanted finer lines, especially with the cherries, but as I went through the process I started to see the technique practices I need to do to learn how to maneuver the brush!

The main take away point from this exercise- stretch yourself! Do something new, do it in wisdom and order, make the right time, clear your space and have fun! Let practice sessions be for practice, do your best, but learn the process, learn through the process and appreciate the outcome, whether it's a piece you frame and hang or toss doesn't matter, you are better at the end than when you started. :)

I am in need of two Thank You cards, so I am taking my need and turning it into an opportunity to be creative and learn something new! I may have coined a new phrase today. I told my mother it seemed like a good opportunity to polish two stones with one cloth! I love animals and have never really appreciated the saying, "Kill two birds with one stone." As my family will attest with grimaces, I am someone who will break for birds, sorry to the people who have been driving behind me! This is why there should be a half to whole car length between you and the car in front of you and your eyes should be focused ahead, not day dreaming or checking texts :)

For this exercise I am following Lindsay Weirich, thefrugalcrafter on her Youtube tutorial, "How to paint wildflowers in watercolor easy tutorial." I chose this one because it is a little more controlled than some of her others and it requires both sketching and painting. My comfort zone with paint is still in the coloring stage, though I have discovered I have some talent beyond my current skill level. I am hoping this blog helps me catch my skills up to my talent and then see how far I can fly...again another great reason not to kill birds!

Okay, what took Lindsay about 8 minutes to draw, paint and explain the whole process took me close to two hours. I watched the video all the way through, then followed her step by step, pausing her video at each step and then proceeding to the next. This is one I will definitely be doing again, after all I said I needed two Thank You cards this week!

These are the paints I used per Lindsay's instructions: Hooker Green, Cadmium Yellow, Ocher Yellow, Alizarin Crimson, Rose Madder and Ultramarine Blue.

I started with a sketch, sketching the daisy and the buttercups. Lindsay showed a technique to help get the shape of flowers which I had never seen before and it helped me amazingly. In her video she shows how to use oval or elliptical shapes and then sketch the petals within the shapes. It helps you draw from perspective, creating that slightly angled look without losing the shape of the flower.

Then the painting started! 

The most difficult part of this for me was definitely the clover (the purple flowers :). Those were not sketched out but done loosely and loose is hard for me so I did practice runs on scratch paper. I think they turned out pretty decently though for a first try. Lindsay has these great white spaces but I ended up with almost no white spaces so I went back with a scrub brush to add some highlights. The leaves were also very difficult. Her press, lift and twist technique is more than my hands could do! So for me I did the technique for each leaf but went back in and shaped them through straight painting. The other thing I will be working on is the shading and highlighting of the daisy. Mine was a little to gray, I need to work on leaving more white and let my shading stay shading! I wasn't a fan of the splatters so I left those off.

I would highly recommend this video and this exercise, though be careful of helpers and observers! I had to paint out a finger smudge after asking advice from my mother the artist! I told her it was wet when she first tapped it--guess she didn't believe me because she proceeded to run her finger over it as a Head Butler would check the mantle for dust!