Watercoloring a stack of books

 Hello & Welcome here, it's my turn to host the watercoloring tutorial challenge at Splitcoaststampers this week and I had come across this stack of books by Olga Koelsch called easiest way to paint a stack of books seen here on YouTube. I knew when I first seen it that it would be close to the start of school restarting for many people and thought, OK its not a fall foliage piece ha ha. And I happen to still have hundreds of hardbound books in a library in my home besides the we will not disclose the number of digital copies I have now. ( my to be read pile will outlive me is my thought) at any rate, I love that she just paints this ( no sketching) but, the colors were (not me) so, when I started mine I cut the Arches cold press paper to 3 1/2" x about 5" ish. And I used some flat shader brushes for the most part and one long round for a bit of the details at the end. 

 First layers of paints. I did use Daniel Smith paints in my palette and I went a little Autumn ish with the shades I guess. 

I remembered the shadow on the bottom and tried to add one to under the thick blue book but, it faded in I guess. Added some of the top of the yellow books cover to the edges of the top green book as well.

 

The original shadow on the photo above was done with and I ended up adding some Moonglow over the top of that for more purple tones. I also added some gold shimmer to a few spots and decided this was "good enough"

Found this previously cut and scored blue textured cardbase in the pile on the table and then fished out this IO banner die ( its from one of Anna's tag die sets I am pretty sure) and stamped on the Unity Stamps sentiment and then inked the edges with some iced spruce Distress Oxide ink. the painted layer and sentiment banner are up on foam tape above this base that is A6 in real life. I am considering this as Hubs Anniversary card for next month unless I come up with something different in the mean time. 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.