Watercoloring a Christmas candle

 This week Linda is sharing this video from the watercolor classroom that uses a stencil for making Bokeh into the background and a nib for a fine line foliage. You can find this tutorial here on YouTube. Now, I don't know how you are when watching these video's but, for me its a little bit of a memory game. what do you remember about it most? I did watch the whole video all the way through and then did the painting 2 days later. So, what stuck with me was the bokeh and the foliage. And I really didn't have a plan for mine.

So, I started with a simple sketch of a candle ish shape with some leaves on the bottom. I had thought to use a stamp but, all my Christmas stamps of candles are taper type candles and I do have the Tim Holtz dies but, I decided to just see what happened.

So I started with the background and then I realized it was drying and I needed to go dig out the stencil so I stopped painting to do that, and I got some OK blobs and some you almost put a hole in the paper ones. 

The very first crafty brushes I ever bought were used to do tee shirt painting with acrylic paint like 30+ years ago, so this scrubber brush was one of those. It has pretty sturdy short bristles. The stencil here is from Donna Downey called bubbles. And I had seen someone do a bokeh background like this before and I had forgotten about it so, I was pretty stoked to try it. 

So, this is where it would have been good to have a plan for the bottom of the painting before I got to it, and I decided that if I remembered correctly there was a lot of fringy foliage on the top so, it didn't matter if it was soft and blurry under that. ha ha. I did use the end of the scrubber brush for the first round of berries here and then of course they were not all the way dry when I decided to do more bokeh parts to the top. 

Before I painted leaves on the painting I did do some trial ones on this piece here with this nib seen below.

I don't see well enough even with my glasses on now to tell you what that says on it. but, it seemed to work OK. I did refill it way more often I think than I seen her doing in the video with what ever it was she was using but, that's OK and I think I will leave this one out on the desk and play with it some more soon.

I did pull off the tape and walk away to let it dry thinking I would get the whole thing damp and add more to the background but, the foliage was bugging me so, I decided to just leave it alone. And then it became a simple card.

Up on some foam tape over textured Bazzill. This one finished out at 5 1/2" 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.