Watercolour word block - SNOW.

Well this must be a record for me as this is my seventh post for today! Also, this is the very first Christmas card that I have made this year - I just need to make the rest before the last minute now!

I am currently participating in the Simply Watercolor Online Card Class, where guest artist Julie Ebersole inspired me to make four different variations of her card example. For my final card in this series I chose the word SNOW and painted it using Kuretake Gansai Tambi watercolour paints. I then added snow flakes and drifting snow using Winsor & Newton white Gouache. I outlined the letters with a silver POSCA paint pen and added the rest of the sentiment with a fine black PITT artist pen. I took a white card blank and added a row of silver glitter tape at the top and bottom, before adhering my painted panel with foam tape for added dimension.

I love the added texture that the white Gouache gives! The photo below shows all four cards in this series - and I have ideas for several more in future. They were so much fun to paint - and not a stamp in sight!

Thank you for looking and I hope that you will forgive me for the post overload today!

Watercolour word block - CAKE

Welcome back for my fifth post today!

I am currently taking the Simply Watercolor Online Card Class where guest artist Julie Ebersole has created a card with a word block, using a wet on wet painting technique. Following my first simple example I decided to do another, more elaborate version, with added texture and smaller additional  illustrated details. I chose the word CAKE and went to town using my Kuretake Gansai Tambi watercolour paints. Again the letters are edged with a silver POSCA paint pen and additional lettering was added with a Faber Castell fine black PITT artist pen.

I layered the finished panel onto pink and then yellow card, added some narrow pink glitter tape to a white card blank then added the layered panel to complete my card.

Thanks for looking. Check out my next post for details of another "altered" word block card :)

Watercoloured circles

Hello and welcome to my third blog post for today. It's a little like waiting for a bus - no posts for ages and then three come along at once!

I painted the card below for the third lesson of Kristina Werner's Simply Watercolor Online Card Class. This time I used my Kuretake Gansai Tambi Watercolour paints for a wet on wet paint technique and added my finished panel to a white card blank. I really wanted to add a stamped mermaid, but I resisted the temptation! I think that this design would work very well with a range of other shapes too and I will probably revisit this to try some others out in future.

Thanks for looking. More cards to follow later!

Watercolour Paint Swatches

Hello and a very belated Happy New Year to you all! Sorry for my lack of blogging recently - I have actually made several cards but haven't had time to show them on my blog yet.

I am currently participating in a fabulous Online Card Class, Watercolour for card makers - Intermediate Techniques.This was part of my Christmas gift from my lovely husband, who also bought me a beautiful set of 36 Japanese Gansai Tambi watercolour paints, a colouring book and some die storage drawers - I'm so lucky!

The teacher, Dawn Woleslage (of Wplus9 fame), set a series of Pre-Class exercises to help us to familiarise ourselves with the properties of our own particular paints. First of all we were advised to make paint swatches of all of our watercolour paints, to enable us to better assess their individual qualities. I painstakingly transferred the swatch charts onto Bockingford 140lb Cold Press watercolour paper using pencil and Black Faber Castel Pitt artist pens (waterproof India Ink). The thick black line within each rectangle is used to establish whether the colours are Transparent, Semi - Transparent or Opaque. One coat of each colour paint was applied to the whole area, then a second coat was added only to the right side of each rectangle to show how the colours become deeper with a second layer of paint.



My first swatch chart shows my new Japanese Gansai Tambi paints from Kuretake. They are deeply pigmented and I love the vibrant colours! As an added bonus there are three metallic paints included too.

 
My second swatch chart was painted using my set of 24 Winsor and Newton Cotman pan paints - also a gift from my husband several years ago. This is my trusty set, which I used to paint landscapes etc when I attended evening classes a couple of years ago. The Cotman range are student grade watercolours which tend to be not so translucent, due to the quantity of binders used during production.

Out of curiosity I purchased a few tubes of Winsor and Newton's Professional watercolour paints to see how they compared to my student grade Cotman set. My third swatch chart below shows these, although I only have 14 colours at the moment. I deliberately left spaces on my chart to include future purchases when I can add to my collection (although there are actually 96 colours in the range, so this may take a while)! The difference in quality was immediately noticeable, with the paints having a more delicate feel to them due to their translucent properties. This makes them much more suitable for techniques such as glazing, where paint is layered. I am looking forward to becoming more familiar with these paints, which I think will be ideal for botanical type paintings.

Thank you for reading this far and I shall be back soon with some completed colour mixing exercises.

Lynn