Watercoloring Waves

 This week it is my turn to pick a video tutorial for the watercolor challenge that happens on Wednesdays at Splitcoaststampers and I have chosen this waves just painting exercise from Emma Jane Lefebvre. 

The colors caught my eye when I was scrolling for something to try and the thing is, she does make this look easier than I found it to be. 

Knowing that, I decided to give it a whirl in the notebook I have of Strathmore cotton watercolor paper for the trial. and so, this is first round of paints.

When I stopped painting it looked like so, and I was frustrated with a lot of it, I know this is cotton paper but, its just not the same as Arches cotton paper and also the narrowness of the paper made it hard to swirl my hand the way I think it needed to be to make actual waves. I was tickled that the water drops made such good light spots on this through :) 

So I found a piece of Arches in the drawer that was this size, didn't measure it but, small enough for a square card front and this was first rounds of paints. 

The waterspotting worked well on this one also so, that was encouraging but, I wanted more colors so went and dug through some palettes I had not played with in a long time to mix in with the Daniel Smith paints. 

This really was a harder thing because, I have my paints mostly sorted by MFG rather than colors. but, I did come across this small one from Prima that is mostly blues and I added some of it over the top also.

And then I started thinking about water critter stamps I have and I happened across this Mermaid Crossing sign first so. out it came. Stamped with some Versafine Twilight ink on a scrap of Arches cold press.

At first I thought I was going to use it like a belly band across the background of waves but, I did end up cutting it down to the edges of the stamped part. 

Poked some holes in the parts of the stamped image where the "nails" were in the sign I guess and ran a sparkly May Arts cord through them to wrap around the background.

I diecut the background with a HoneyBee stamps deckled edge square die and then put the mermaid sign (Hampton Arts) on that. The base here is Stampin' Up Denim and its 5 1/2" square in real life. 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.