Watercoloring through a stencil

 This week Angie has chosen this tutorial offered up by Altenew on watercoloring through a stencil seen here on YouTube. 

I don't remember what she said she used to stick her stencil to her wc paper but, I had a can of Krylon easy tack. ( I think I bought it just for this reason to use with stencils actually) and this is the first time I can remember doing this)

So, I also grabbed a Simon Says Stamp tumbling leaves stencil and some Arches cold press paper cut to about 6 1/2" x 6 1/2" so that I had wiggle room. 

I mostly used a damp brush more than a wet one doing a line of color on the leaves with the paler shade of green and using the damp brush to the other side for it to flow then taped in some darker green to the ends. 

Like so

I did lift the stencil before it was completely dry to see if it had worked and I did see some adhesive on the wc paper. 

So I waited for it to completely dry to rub off the adhesive from the watercolor paper. I tried rinsing the stencil under warm water to get the adhesive off it but, that did not work so, I found a piece of plastic to stick my stencil to since it is tacky. 

I didn't want to cover up the color flow on those leaves so I found a small word die from Altenew called Essential sentiment strips, cut it from a scrap of green and white cardstocks and taped those letters back into the holes on the back side. this is up on foam pop dots. The base is some textured Bazzill and this is finished out at 6" square in real life, If you'd like to play along with us you can find this challenge here at Splitcoaststampers. Thanks for stopping by.

Watercoloring a simple Robin

 It's my turn to host the watercoloring challenge at Splitcoaststampers this week and I have chosen this quick 5 minute tutorial from MoonMoonartwork seen here on YouTube on doing two versions of a simple robin. one is wet on wet and the second is wet on dry. and she make it look so easy. And I have after all this time some thought in the back of my head to try it as practice first when it looks so simple so, I grabbed this Strathmore cotton small notebook I have and gave the wet on wet one a try on the left side.

even though this is cotton watercolor paper, it does not work the same as Arches. So, that being said I also mixed a few colors to come up with that brown-ish red for the breast color. It is some Anthroquid Scarlet, Quinacridone burnt orange, & Goethite (Brown Ochre) and I figured close enough. ( it did dry much paler than this though) 

Decided to do the wet on dry look to the right of the first trial bird and neither of these is that great but, also not horrible so, I grabbed some good paper and then switched to a mop brush instead as I had noticed that was what she was using in her video for the body.

This is Arches hot press watercolor paper, same colors as the birds above.

I used a premade cardbase in a chocolate brown color (unknown) and cut the painted bird panel with an Impression Obsession the largest die in the Crazy stitched set. That sentiment is pre printed form AALL & Create. ( its hard to see even in real life and reads" They say good things take time... that's why I'm always late." the edges of the painted panel and the sentiment strip were color dusted with some distress oxide Vintage photo ink. 

I did line the inside of the card with some white Neenah and the white on the eye an beak is some Windsor & Newton white Gouache. That's about it from me, If you'd like to play along with us you can find this challenge here. Thanks for stopping by.