Watercolor for Cardmakers - Intermediate Techniques: Days 5 and 6

Hello!

I've finally found a moment to sit down to photograph and blog my homework from days 5 and 6 of Watercolor for Cardmakers: Intermediate Techniques where we were taught expressive florals. This style can be either easy or challenging, depending on your mental state! As a perfectionist, it was difficult for me to just let the paints do whatever they wanted to do with a tiny bit of direction from me.

My first challenge was to follow Dawn's direction to not worry about wasting my expensive and valuable watercolour paper, haha! She is right, how can we improve if we don't practice? And since the paints behave differently with different papers, you really need to practice on the paper you intend to use.

So I practised, and then I started making little paintings. I have made a card from one of the paintings I made during day 5 practice, and I will make more. I like some of what I created, and the others I learned from.

My first one uses just the natural shape of the brush to create the leaves and flowers. I like this effect. I've seen a few others in the gallery using the same technique but with quite different feels, and all so beautiful!

I love these little flowers. They remind me of crepe myrtle. I'm thinking I'll explore this technique a bit more, to see if I can actually create something that really does look like crepe myrtle. :-)

Oh, how I struggled with these little roses! It's such a loose painting style, and you really don't know what you'll get until you're finished.

This one I did not like at all. But I can see things that worked in it, so it was a good practice.

So after the rose that I didn't like, I decided to try one more time and created this one, which I do like.

I liked it so much I decided to scan it and make it into a card. (I'm not happy with my stamping of the sentiment, but since it is a scanned copy, I can just fix it later with another print.)

I then moved onto day 6 homework. First I tried Sanketi's lessons. I've successfully used Sanketi's techniques previously, but this time I really found it challenging. I love her style and I always learn something when I watch her videos. :-)

So after that, and feeling frustrated I gave myself a day of rest. I returned to the expressive florals with two ideas. The first was that I wanted to experiment with what happens when I use less water and a smaller brush. I was pleasantly surprised! I can see some potential in this style for me.

Then I tried to create some cosmos with wet flowers and drier leaves and stems. I played around with my greens to create some variation, and I really gave it a good splatter!

So, that's where I'm up to. I've loved these classes so much. I knew that I would learn from Dawn and my admiration for her has just increased over this class.

Thanks for visiting!

Michelle
xxx

Fusion - Paper Hearts

Hello!

For Fusion Card Challenge I am using one of my watercolour pieces created during Online Card Classes Watercolor for Cardmakers: Intermediate Techniques. I couldn't resist when I saw the inspiration, watercolour was the perfect choice!

To create this card, I traced around my heart dies to make the shapes and then watercoloured. For my perfectionist inner critic, it was really difficult to have my hearts imperfect, but at the same time, it's the imperfection that I really like in this card. Yes, I'm a little bit crazy. ;-)

How cool is this inspiration photo and sketch? Perfect for Valentine's cards!

WARNING: This bit is me moaning about the heat.
Speaking of cool, I'm super-envious of all of those snow photos I'm seeing from the northern hemisphere! Here in Brisbane we've had over a week of high temperatures with high humidity. The ceiling fans do nothing but move the hot, moist air around. I can't sleep. I feel physically ill from the heat and humidity. It's driving me crazy. Everything is wet! I keep hoping we'll get a giant thunderstorm that will blow in a cool change. I keep seeing the thunderstorms heading off in the distance - flashing lightning, giant clouds, and nothing for us! I whinge every time the weather gets like this. I'm not a fan of hot Summers, give me cold Winters any day! (We don't get those here, the coldest we get in Winter is just below 0 degrees celcius, definitely no snow.) Maybe soon we'll get those much needed rain storms to take away the heat, then I can cheer up! ;-)

Thanks for visiting! I hope you're inspired to join us at Fusion Challenge. I'll be looking for you in the gallery.

Michelle
xxx

Watercolor for Cardmakers - Intermediate Techniques: Day 3

Hello!

Day 3 of Watercolor for Cardmakers: Intermediate Techniques was challenging! I haven't made any cards from my work yet, but I did create a postcard for my daughter from the scanned image of one of them.

I worked on two lessons at once.

Negative painting is about creating a background that brings your images to the front. I need a bit more practice on this one, but it was a really interesting process to play with.

I drew the heart outlines around a die because I had no heart outline stamps. Halfway through the process I lost my pencil lines, so I just used my imagination to keep the hearts in the picture. ;-)

Lifting is about lifting paint to leave highlights. One of the hardest things for me in watercolour is the inability to ADD highlights. As far as I can tell, you need to either leave the highlights from the beginning, or use lifting to remove some of the colour. VERY challenging for me, haha! For my first attempt I used Jane's Doodles Pretty Peonies stamp for the main flower. Again, I lost the stamped image partway through my painting, so I did my best without it. I really don't like the leaves and stems in this first effort, but as with all of these lessons, the more mistakes I make, the more I learn. I do like my freehand buds. :-)

For my second attempt, I drew my main rose (which looked so much better in pencil!). When I started lifting, I rounded the petals more than I wanted, but the lifting worked, so I can't complain. I'm getting there. Next time I want my ruffled petals AND lifting that works. I'm happier with the leaves and stems this time. I also made some mistakes that I successfully fixed, so I'm excited!

By this time I was running late with lessons, so I have paused in my day 3 practice so that I can move on. 

I printed the heart watercolour onto photo paper for my daughter. On glossy photo paper, it glows.

I'm running out of time for class homework. I'm back to work tomorrow (I had last week off to settle the kids into school), which means I'm back to night time crafting, which is rather difficult with my (getting old) eyes and limited time to allow watercolouring to dry. I hope to get some more done today, so that I just have fun practising to do this week.

Thanks for visiting!

Michelle

xxx

Watercolor for Cardmakers - Intermediate Techniques: Day 2

Hello!

I'm only halfway through my homework for Day 2 of Watercolour for Cardmakers: Intermediate Techniques but I need to move onto Day 3 (because there's even more exciting things to learn there!). I'll go back to finishing Day 2 because I am very much still exploring the lessons.

So on day 2, I learned how to make cornflowers and promptly applied the lesson to create poppies instead. My daughter requested that I go back and make cornflowers for her, haha!

I also learned how to make a brush stroke rose from Jennifer Rzasa. In that lesson, she also pointed out that scanning our artwork and printing onto cardstock means that we can use our art multiple times. I have no idea why I never thought of this before, but it is BRILLIANT! I'm so excited!

This first rose pretty much copied Jen's example. My second rose was a challenge to myself to attempt to create two roses with one in front of the other. This is one of my challenges when drawing or painting flowers - I struggle to layer them up - so I'm working on it.

The cards are made using the scanned images of my paintings. I'm really happy how they turned out.

Here are the cards beside the original watercolours.

I still have two lessons to apply from day 2. I have one halfway made but I'm stuck on ideas to make a card. The other technique I am yet to try, but I will. ;-)

Thank-you for dropping by to visit me!

Michelle
xxx

Watercolor for Cardmakers - Intermediate Techniques: Day 1

Hello!

Most of you who know me also know that I have a fascination with watercolour and a desire to build up some competency with this tricky medium. I took the Online Card Classes Watercolor for Cardmakers back in May 2014. I learned so much from that class that when I saw that Watercolor for Cardmakers: Intermediate Techniques was on offer, I just had to join in again!

Yesterday I worked on my pre-work and also Day 1 techniques. That was a day of mixed results! But even the dodgy ones taught me something, so it's all positive! :-)

I made one card from the day's work.

I used an apple die to create the outlines, although I think they turned out looking more like peaches, haha!

My other work for the day included lots of experimenting with water and colour to see what it would do. This pile of experiments is currently sitting on my table reminding me to keep on working on it.

Now I'm off to look over Day 2's videos and do a little more work on it before picking up my girls from their first day of the new school year!

Thanks for visiting!

Michelle
xxx

Online Card Classes - Copics for Cardmakers - Days 1 to 5

Hi there!

I have signed up to Copics for Cardmakers, but was unable to start lessons until yesterday. Firstly, I was away for work this week. Secondly, I only owned about three colours and needed just a few more to practise with! Luckily for me, my order arrived in the mail yesterday morning. :-)

I am sharing my progress here, but please note, I am an absolute beginner. These are my very first Copic lessons. It is highly unlikely that anyone will learn anything from me, but hopefully in a few months, we can look back and see some progress, lol!

Second disclaimer - unusually for me, neatness has not been a priority. I'll tidy up how I work once I've learned some of the techniques. You'll see lots of outside-the-line colouring here.

Day 1 - Blending Basics

We started with two colour and three colour blending on balloons. I forgot to practice three colour blending because I was most interested in learning how to blend two colours (to stretch my limited stash). We were taught how to create light using the Blender, but I didnt' practice it this time. On the second balloons, those highlights were just created by leaving the first colour alone in that spot (not going over them again).

I forgot to add the red and green colours onto this next one. They were R29, R24, R22, and YG23, YG95.

Day 2 - Blending Tricks
On Day 2 we learn about tip-to-tip blending, acetate blending, and feathering. All very cool techniques that I didn't even know existed, except perhaps the feathering, but the lesson taught me more than I knew, for sure!

The little red-breast was made using tip-to-tip AND acetate blending. The little grey bird was just an experiment on my own to see how he would look in grey.

Next came butterflies.

 On the second butterfly I used feathering and tip to tip blending. I also added black outlines.

Day 3 - Get More Mileage out of Your Markers
I found the blending with grey lessons fascinating! Some of my results were a bit dodgy, but even those "not so great" results taught me things! The use of grey may be one of the best things I take away from this online class. That I need to buy more grey markers may be the accompanying lesson (I have three greys, T1, T4, and T6, that's it).

The umbrellas practice taught me all sorts of things that I should NOT do... and a few that I should.

Day 4 - Turning on the Lights
Day 4 was all about shading. My favourite lesson was where I learned how to imagine sections of images as either round, oval, square, etc and to imagine where the shadows would fall, depending on the light source direction. My favourite revelation was that it's okay to shade any way you choose to. :-)

The first flower has directional light. The second used the feathering technique on the flowers with more realistic leaves. The third flower I didn't like much (too dark), so I decided to experiment with the leaf colour, which was an interesting process.

Day 5 - Colouring skin, hair, and clothing
I will admit that I never thought I would learn how to colour skin and hair. It looks so tricky. I now think that with a little practice that I WILL learn this skill. Yay! I don't have many skin/hair colours, but I don't imagine I'll do much colouring of people, so for the moment my few colours will suffice.

When I was working on my first ballerina last night, my little real-life ballerina came over and exclaimed "You're colouring me!". She was right. I was colouring my ballerina to look like my little girl. :-)  She then put in an order for a ballerina in an aqua tutu, which I made this morning.

The aqua ballerina pleased my daughter and the order for my next ballerina is a red dress. Maybe I WILL be colouring more people... lol!

So that wraps up the first five days of lessons. I hope that next week I will be able to play along within a day or two of the lesson. I'm really enjoying this class and I'm so glad that I signed up. If you have been thinking of joining in, it's worth it! I managed to catch up on the first five days over the course of a day, so you certainly have time to join in and catch up with the rest of us. :-)

See you later!

Michelle
xxx