watercoloring vintage tags

 This week I am hosting the Water coloring challenge for Wednesday and these pretty tag looking shapes caught my eye when I was trolling youtube to find something a while back. She is a new artist for me and I was really curious to see the colors and if the process is similar to using your water reactive say distress oxide inks. ( it is and she does) so, if you are familiar with dropping in color and letting it dry and splattering. this is just that kind of a tutorial. You can watch it here on YouTube. the title is playing with watercolour and stamps by TheCreativeCove. If you watch the first 13 minutes the rest of the video is very similar and the only thing that really changes is in the last 30 seconds she does flash a few finished pieces from a similar style of water coloring stamped image panels as tags. 

I was really curious to see what colors she chose and I knew I probably would not have the same colors so, I just looked at my palette and went with Paynes grey blue, Prussian Blue, Geothite, Sepia, Transparent red oxide, & burnt sienna ( mixed with paynes grey blue), and some Prima #53 "glaze" a gold-ish shimmer color. 

I grabbed a sheet of Arches cold press watercolor paper and taped off some spaces. ( its not measured just eyeballed) my inner control freak said using this wide tape left me enough wiggle room to make them straight if needed later. 

Using a round size 8 brush.

I barely remembered to take a photo of the bottom row with some stamped foliage before I started painting them oops. the one on the far left is the tip of Penny Black "all you need is love", the one with the trio of almost fern like leaves next to it is unknown, the next to that with the script between the stems I want to say is Unity Stamps and the one on the far right is tall seaweed from All Night Media.

 

randomly dropped in more paint to the stamped sections. This is the wet version of where I stopped.

what it looked like dry. 

So, I knew I needed to pick a gold shade for shimmer and just laid this cheat sheet from a Prima palette on the top of the dried paint. I decided to start with the top right corner and the Antique shade in the top right corner of the palette. 

but, it really just made harsh lines and no shimmer so, I switched over to the allure (#51) color.

a few more splatters and I decided to let it dry again before trying some free hand foliage on the top. If I had been thinking I would have stamped the top row as I would have a place for my hand on the glass below the bottom row ha ha. 

I only free painted some foliage into the top outside sections of the top row and decided to keep two as just color as little blocks of color that I may build on later someday.

and when the paint was dry I pulled the masking tape off. If you'd like to play along with us you can find this challenge here at Splitcoaststampers. Thanks for stopping by.