Leafy Watercolours Part II

Hello all!  I will try not to keep you long today... I'm just here to share the next batch of my daily watercolouring for World Watercolour Month.  Rather than following the prompts on offer, I decided to put in some work playing with brush strokes and paint/water concentrations to get my hand back in, as I'd not played with the watercolour paints for quite a long time.  So I have been doing daily leaf studies.  (Sorry it's a bit dark over to the right - it's hard to find a large enough patch of consistent light to have four A4 pieces of paper all together.)

This is the second batch.  If you missed the first Leafy Watercolours, that's where you'll find details of the paper I'm using and the colours in my limited palette.  I'm not sure there's an even progression of "getting better"... they come and go according to what kind of mood/focus/presence I'm bringing to the craft table each time.







So some of my favourites are in the first batch, but there are a couple more this time joining my short list.















I've continued the pattern of masking up the paper and adding background washes on day 1, and then adding leafy designs to both sides on day 2.

So it is daily watercolouring.  It's just not strictly one painting per day!









So let's not hang around any longer.  Here they are in order.  (As I said before, I'm waiting until I have the whole collection before I cut them up into individual paintings.)

Days 9 and 10... (where I suddenly remember how much I like furling the edges of the leaves!)

Days 11 and 12...

Days 13 and 14... (it's that Moonglow magic again - not so happy with the leaves but oh, the colours!)

Days 15 and 16... (the little round leaves make me very happy)

I know which are my favourites.  I wonder which are yours?

Some of you will have seen snippets of these over at my new Instagram page, but I'm trying to keep something back for the blog, which is the virtual scrapbook which really matters to me, so this is the first time the whole paintings have been on display.

Thanks so much for stopping by today.  I hope you all have a lovely weekend, and I look forward to hopping round soon to see what you've all been up to.  Stay safe, stay well, everyone.

In every change, in every falling leaf there is some pain, some beauty. And that's the way new leaves grow.
Amit Ray

I'd like to share these at Paint Party Friday where they are on Week 20 of Year 10.  So happy to have been spotlit there by the random generator last week!
And I'm back to Do What Makes You Happy for Sue's lovely theme at Country View Challenges

Double-sided Acetate

Hello all!  Firstly, a quick heads-up... I've just embarked on an Instagram journey, so if you'd like to see how that looks, do come and follow me there.  My Instagram name is w0rdsandp1ctures (I'm far too late to the Instagram party to have those words without fiddling around a little bit).  I'm determined to keep blogging too though (unless New Blogger makes life so miserable that I can't bear it!), so don't worry.  I like words as well as pictures...

This post title may be a reference known only to a particular viewership and a particular age group... Blue Peter, a children's show on the BBC, used to make craft projects every now and then and rather than mention a brand name would refer to "double-sided sticky tape".  We all knew who they meant!  But it seemed a good name for this post sharing a couple of samples from my latest stamp release with PaperArtsy. 

One quote/tag is for EAB19 Life & Living and one is for EAB20 Night & Day, but the thing the pair of them have in common is the stamping and embossing of the quote on acetate for a rather magical effect.  It wasn't until later that I realised that the acetate stamping wasn't all they shared!





Don't panic if you're finding the quotes hard to read in the photo above... it's not your eyesight.  Thanks to the sunlight they are there in double because of the shadow (and so the post title just keeps on giving!). 

When you look at them in the shade, or just in normal light, you can read them perfectly well...










... but you can still see the background and/or stamping going on behind at the same time.  So again, it's almost like seeing double.  You get the quote, but you don't lose anything behind it.

But just wait until you see the magic when the full shadow effect is in operation!!











First things first, though...  These started with a simple sponged background, blending the paints on for a lovely soft ombre effect.  The left-hand one is the tag for the meadow flower Life & Living tag... you'll see the other in action in an upcoming post.












And then for this one I got out one of my oldest stamp acquisitions, this fabulous PaperArtsy Hot Picks wildflower stem.  It's stamped in Olive Archival.













One of the things I love about it is that it has a fairly bendy stem so you can reposition it to go in a different direction which means it looks like two different flowers!













And at the foot of the tag is another long-time favourite, these lovely birds amidst the grassy stems.














And now for that sunlit magic...  I'm so in love with this effect!  The words are stamped in Archival and embossed in Wow Earthtone Pepper, a lovely mottled grey.  But just look at that shadow... double George Eliot delight!












Let's take a quick look at the other tag, using the amazing Jack London quote from the Night & Day plate.  I think these words are simply magical, so I kept the tag nice and simple to let them shine.  And I'm more than happy to have these words twice over!!










There's another sponged background - I use a natural sponge which I think gives a much better texture.  The surrounding stamps are Hot Picks again...  this is just a partial stamping of the gorgeous giant moon from HP1903. 

I painted a white area over my sponging before stamping in Watering Can Archival, so that the moon could glow nicely.









And here are those birds back in action.   I honestly wasn't thinking of these tags as a pair - they were made on different days.  It wasn't until I was photographing all the sample batches that I realised how much they have in common.













They're stamped in Archival and embossed in the Wow Pepper, just like the quote itself.  When you get it at the right angle, it has a lovely light-reflecting gleam.








So two relatively simple tags apart from that leap of faith of stamping onto the acetate.  (It's just some leftover packaging, by the way, nothing fancy.)  I hadn't really thought when I did it that you would get those lovely shadows, I just rather liked the idea of giving the words a bit of dimension, floating above the tag.





The doubling of the words was a delightful bonus which appeared as I was photographing them... happy accidents are so lovely, aren't they?  I hope they give you as much pleasure as they do me.





That's your lot for today, but as I say, if you're on Instagram do come and say hello to me there.  I'm still finding my way around so that will make it much easier for me to find and visit you in return.  I hope you're all having a good week, and I look forward to some more blog-visiting soon.  Happy crafting all!

I thought the most beautiful thing in the world must be shadow.
From The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath

Leafy Watercolours

Hello all!  I'm here struggling to make my peace with new Blogger.  It's irritating because the thing I'm sharing has been giving me a good deal of peace, calm and joy and now I have to go through this frustrating process with ugly new Blogger to try to share it with you.  (Okay - images just not working - I can't move them around - so I've reverted to Legacy, but have just found this update posted at 5am today, which gives me hope.)

I mentioned when I shared my Simplify, Breathe tags for A Vintage Journey's Watercolour Wonders theme that I was aiming to do some daily watercolouring, since July is apparently World Watercolour Month.  I was in a wonderful watercolour flow a year or so ago, but haven't really played much lately and I thought this would be a good way back in to something which makes me very happy.  I haven't been following the suggested prompts, though.  I decided I was just going to work my way through some leaf studies.

So I'm here today to share the first batch - days 1 to 8.  They come in pairs.  I have been doing daily watercolouring, but day 1 has worked out as being the taping up of the pages, and adding soft background washes across both halves.

And then on day 2 I add the leaves on both "pages".  So far, that has been dictated by work patterns - day 1 has happened to be a busy day, so I've been glad to have only the early stages to deal with.  And day 2 has happened to be quieter so I've been able to give the painting a bit more attention.

But I now rather like the pattern of the work.  And having two paintings on the go simultaneously means that even if I end up not very happy with one, at least I'm usually okay with the other.  I'm working with a 9 x 12 pad of 100% cotton 300gsm paper.

I put together a limited palette of watercolour paints for the month on one of my heavyweight plastic trays.

If you're curious they are Buff Titanium (Daniel Smith), Coastal Fog (American Journey), Rare Green Earth, Green Gold, Serpentine, Green Apatite (all DS), Prussian Blue (AJ, but swapped out on day 7 for Moonglow DS), Blue Apatite, Kyanite, Gray Titanium, Shadow Violet, Lunar Violet (all DS again).

I'll just quickly take you through the pairs.  (I've decided not to chop them up into individual pages until the end of the month.)  There are some I really like.  Other days things didn't flow quite as well, but I'm sure different people will have different favourites... let me know which are yours!

Days 1 and 2...

Days 3 and 4...

Days 5 and 6 (with a little touch of added dip pen and ink)...

Days 7 and 8 (with the arrival of Moonglow - magic!)...

I can't imagine how I managed to leave Moonglow out in the first palette selection - it's my favourite watercolour paint!








I'm still on track as I write this, with the first pair of the next batch already mostly done.  I tend to add extra details as the earlier layers dry.  If you're interested in a couple more process photos in future, I'll try to oblige.  For starters, there's the magical moment when you remove the masking tape... that always makes me happy!














But for now I'll leave you with these couple of close-ups to enjoy the watercolour flow.







Thanks so much for stopping by, and I'll be round to see what you've been up to soon.   I know I've been a poor visitor lately - lockdown has done strange things to my processes and habits.  I'm sure I'm not the only one!  Take care all and I'll see you soon.

What I love about watercolour is that lots of happy accidents occur.
Jane Seymour

At the Simon Says Stamp Monday Challenge the invitation this week is to Play With Paint
At Country View Challenges they want us to Do What Makes You Happy
I'd like to share these at Paint Party Friday where they are on Week 19 of Year 10

Simplify, Breathe

Hello all!  Apparently July is World Watercolour month, so the new challenge theme at A Vintage Journey is well-timed.  The lovely Deb is our host, and she's in search of Watercolour Wonders.  You don't have to use actual watercolours, just any colour medium which is reactive with water... Distress Inks, pigment powders and so on.  All the details are over at A Vintage Journey, along with lots of inspiration from my fellow Creative Guides, so do check it out.  First of all, though, here's my watery offering for you.

Rather than watercolours, I used water-reactive Distress Inks for my backgrounds on these thistly tags.  But I am setting myself a daily watercolour challenge through July too, so keep an eye out for weekly (?) updates here.  I thought by saying it out loud to you here, that might encourage me to stick to it!  I love playing with watercolour, but I haven't done nearly enough of it lately.

You can see the wrinkle-free distress backgrounds in all their glory here in the early stages.

I think Faded Jeans, Broken China, Bundled Sage, Peeled Paint and Mowed Lawn are all in there somewhere, along with plenty of watery spritzing, smooshing and layering.






When I'm smooshing, I always work with multiple tags to make sure I'm using as much of the ink on the mat as humanly possible, so I ended up with a pair to work with this time.












I decided I'd play with this fabulous thistle stamp, one of Tracy Evans' designs for AALL & Create.  (I don't generally work with clear stamps - some of my earliest purchases were clear stamps and a couple have deteriorated quite badly - but there are some of Tracy's images which have proven simply irresistible!)














On one tag I embossed the image with Wow Bright White embossing powder.  And on the other I used my much-loved Earthtone Pepper, also by Wow.















The "watercolours" or watery inks are meant to be the highlight of these tags, so I didn't want to cover them up too much.












There's some fine twine wrapped around the lower end of the tags and I tied on a couple of Philosophy Tags which I altered with the same 
powders.













The one on the white thistle tag has a coating of the Pepper (I was relieved when the words continued to be visible - I hoped, but I wasn't sure!)...













... and the one on the pepper thistle tag has a coating of Bright White.  I deliberately roughened the edges before heating the powder so that some of the metal would show through.












I did a bit of extra stamping using just the text from the image to balance the tags.  It just wanted a bit more detail to the side of the main stamping.














The tags needed a little something more so I fished out some sequins and stuck them in various places.














The glossy embossing is already doing quite a good job of catching the light with that reflective dimensional surface.















But the sequins are of course especially designed to reflect light, and they do it so well!












I did a bit of doodling with my dip pen and white ink to create some frames around the edges, and the same fine twine finishes things off at the top of the tag.

And there's splatter in complementary colours too - some white spatter on the pepper thistle tag... and some grey/brown spatter on the white thistle tag.






So there you have it... some water and some colour and away you go.  I hope you'll be inspired to join us on A Vintage Journey some time this month with some Watercolour Wonders of your own.  Check out the inspiration over there too, and have a fabulous weekend.  Thanks so much for stopping by and I'll see you again soon.

Because watercolour actually moves on the paper, it is the most active of all mediums, almost a performance art.
Nita Engle

The theme over at Country View Crafts this month is Do More of What Makes You Happy, so I'd like to play along there.  Watercolouring makes me very happy, and I haven't done any in months.  In fact, any play time with inks and water makes me happy.  So I'm very happy that World Watercolour Month is going to make me spend more time doing just that!
At Crafty Cardmakers they would like us to Create Your Own Background - this is one of my favourite ways to do that