Watercoloring Snowmen

 This week Kia is sharing this video which shows painting two slightly different snowman watercolors at the same time that you can see here on YouTube by Ellen Crimi-Trent. The name of that video is how to paint watercolor snowmen greeting cards/watercolor Christmas cards. 

It starts with sketch a couple one maybe more like a close up selfie type view and the other with a little more background and a house on the hill.

So I cut the Arches cold press watercolor paper to 4 1/2" square with the thought of using them on 5 1/2" square cards when finished. or tags. I had not decided that exactly at this point, and I had totally been thinking about decorating for Christmas and in my head I was thinking salt box type house for the house. (and I sketched it flat) 

I am right handed so, instead of starting to paint on the right panel I started with the left so that I would not be dragging my hand / sleeve through the paint. I also seen I still had some paint on a small pallet that was used to do that two colors landscape I hosted a while back so, I used that paint rather than doing what ever colors she used. ( these are also granulating colors) Sodalite Genuine And Transparent Red Oxide are the main colors here. I did use some Paynes grey blue for some darker color on the eyes and then some sepia or the branches.

So, my colors are also a little reversed from what she had shown doing her closer snowman with more browns and the other one as more blues but, I figured it really didn't matter that much. and at this point I knew that house sketch was not going to work.

When the backgrounds were (mostly) dry. It's been incredibly cold here the last week or so and paint is drying very slowly. I did go in and add paint to the snowmen themselves. one of my favorite parts of the video was watching her add the shadows. ( esp. the carrot shadows as it was done over the top of the face and I was tickled to see mine worked and I did not make mud on their faces) 

a little more paint was added and I converted my "house" to a bit pine tree.

I did windsor & newton white gouache for my falling snow. and it looked ok while wet but, dried to nothing.

So I added another round of Dr. PH Martins bleed proof white over the top of the Gouache for snowfall and it helped but, it was still pretty subtle. pulled off the tape and seen this pad of wood grain paper off to the side ( my table is a heaping mess right now) and pulled papers for both cards from that pad. 

The let it snow here is from the waffle flower cozy sentiments set done in Versafine clair Nocturn ink. the one on the right I stamped it on a scrap of thin brown paper and then cut that one with a Spellbinders deckle rectangle die. The lace is vintage and the ribbon is maybe May Arts? (I've had it for years) 

This one the base is 5 1/2" square Neenah solar white 

This one is also same size with a kraft 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 SCS. thanks for stopping by.

December Dirty Dozen Christmas

 I can not hardly believe it is already December. I have to laugh at my self as even just a couple of years ago I thought time moved quickly. It's sped up again for me. At any rate the very last prompt for playing along with the Dirty Dozen and creating for Christmas is up here in the forums for Fan Club members at Splitcoaststampers and I ended up going this away for my sample. 

I ended up stamping this Santa Hat (from The Stamp Pad) on some Artist loft watercolor paper and painting it with Daniel Smith and Windsor & Newton (red) paints. When that was dry I cut the watercolor paper with an Honeybee stamps deckle square die and inked the edges with some DOX vintage photo ink as it was a similar color as the crackle in this paper I found in an Craft Consortium Test of time pad. Lately I have been trying really hard to not pay package type postage costs for my cards, so. I have been keeping them at 5 1/2" square and fairly flat so they will slid through that slot at the post office. with that in mind. I did just cut off two snips of this ribbon and wrapped it around the printed paper layer and just under the edges of the painted layer so, there is not ribbon twice across the whole bottom of the card. the corner of the sentiment panel (Stamp is from the Taylored Expressions Santa stop here set) and cut with an old Spellbinders mega deckle rect. die I just folded my glue dot in that bottom right corner in half as that edge was up slightly because of the ribbon above it instead of you know putting foam pop dots under the whole thing. 

I did go over the berries with a white gel pen ( which was not very visible with all the rest of the white) and a bronze sparkle paint on the jingle bells ( again not much shimmer as there is also a lot of brown on this card) so, I decided to add some Nuvo Crystal glaze in those areas. It is still pretty subtle even in real life.  That's about it from me, Thanks for stopping by.