Watercoloring a Simple Landscape

 This week Angie has chosen this landscape video tutorial from MarenaArt seen here on YouTube for beginners. 

I had happened to have a scrap of Arches hot press cut in the drawer so I just started with that and some Daniel Smith watercolor paints. 

 It was about 9% humidity when I was trying this and I started thinking maybe I should have cut the paper down more as I could not quite keep it damp enough to move the paints.

The sponges I have in reach are sea sponges and so, I tried the foliage with that. They are not quite as tight of an cluster as the ones on the video.

and my stems, ugh. So, I set this sheet aside and found a smaller scrap from some Strathmore 400 series to play with.

This time I tried to keep the colors darker, and since it is that plastic-y paper it did stay wet and repel the paint a little better than the cotton did.

while I was standing there I had the bright idea to totally re-wet over the whole surface of the cotton paper and try it again right over the top, figured the first round of paint would just be shadow texture.

And so, the cotton paper did hold up to being wet twice and it does look a little better. So far these are just trial paintings and not finished cards. I do like the horizon colors on the smaller strathmore scene better than on the cotton scene. I am thinking I will press these in the big shot to flatten them out and see about mounting them later this afternoon. 

I ended up getting a message at work this morning that someone I know needed a sympathy card so, I decided to go that away with the taller panel. I did die cut it with a Waffle Flower A7 rectangle die and then the sentiment here is from Clearly Besotted message me set diecut with a Nellie Snellen tags 3 die. The base here is some barely grey textured bazzill that was cut to become an A7 base. That's about it from me, I hope you all are doing well. If you'd like to play along with us you can find this challenge here at Splitcoaststampers. Thanks for stopping by.