The Wonderful Word for This Wednesday is ‘Valentines’

Remember the fun of Valentines Day as a kid?  We would be tasked with making and decorating a box or pouch to receive valentines in from classmates and eagerly await the little store bought character valentines.  Sometimes, there would even be a small message on there from a friend, instead of just, “To: Kim   From: _____”, and then you knew that person thought you were EXTRA special.  But did you ever get handmade valentines?

Last year, when my youngest was in 5th grade, we made handmade valentines (watercolor with white crayon resist) for each of his classmates.  It was such a great memory, Meema even helped!  Hopefully some of those kids felt extra special having received a HANDMADE Valentine.

this is a pic of my son's handmade valentine's for his class

So for this week’s post, I thought we’d make adult handmade Valentines cards.  I did this over the weekend and had so much fun that I thought I’d share.

It all started with a book I got from the library called “Hello Watercolor” * by Jeannie Dickson.  It’s WAY overdue (sorry to those of you waiting for it) so I thought I’d better learn what I can out of this book so I can return it.  There was one project in particular that I really liked called “Sparkling Shards”.

This pic shows the cover of the book, "Hello Watercolor!"This pic show the page in the book for the "Sparkling Shards" project.

In this project she uses polygons, but I thought I’d use hearts as it’s February. When I was finished I was underwhelmed so I cut it up into card sized pieces and made cards out of them.  The cards turned out fantastic!

Note: It’s amazing how different the cards look from the original project in the pics below, but the big piece was scanned and cards were photographed – same art though!

This shows my finished project

This shows the cards I made from this watercolor project

I decided to try another one but changed it up a bit.  This time, I skipped the background part and just painted transparent hearts in a similar way and then cut them up for cards.  I was THRILLED with how this project came out!

This shows the finished sheet of overlapping watercolor hearts

This pic shows one of the cards I made with the watercolor project.This pic shows one of the cards I made with the watercolor project.

This pic shows one of the cards I made with the watercolor project.This pic shows one of the cards I made with the watercolor project.

Give it a go!  Here’s How

Materials:

  • Watercolors (any kind and any colors you like)
  • Size 8 round brush (or any size close to this)
  • 10 x 10 piece of cold pressed water color paper
  • Gray marker
  • Gold guache or watercolor or even acrylic ink.  If you don’t have any of those things, just use a gold pen or skip this step, it will still look amazing.

Step 1

Paint hearts in all colors all over your page without letting them touch or overlap and let them dry completely before going on to step 2.

When you paint the hearts, make the outline with your chosen color and then use a clean brush charged with clean water to pull the color in and paint the inside.

You can make them even more translucent by using the ‘lifting’ method: once you paint the whole heart in, use a clean damp brush to lift up color from the inside and dab it off on a paper towel with each lift.

Step 2

Pick one side of your paper as a light source reference and shade the opposite side of the hearts with a gray marker or more of the same color of watercolor as each heart (this first pic below doesn’t have shading yet, but the pic for step 4 has shading)

Let that dry completely.

Step 3

Splatter a little bit of all of your colors (one by one) all over your paper

Let that dry completely

This shows the first step of the project

Step 4

Repeat steps 1-3 but let this layer of hearts overlap the first layer in some places.

Let it dry completely.

This show step 2 of layering watercolor hearts

Step 5

One more layer of hearts and splatters!

Step 6

Add a little gold for a highlight of sorts on the light source side of some, or all of the hearts.

This shows the finished sheet of overlapping watercolor hearts

Step 7

Cut your paper up in card size pieces (I had blank cards in various colors that were 4 1/4 x 51/2 so I cut my watercolor cards out a little smaller than that and this 10×10 watercolor paper made 4 cards.

To make these extra cute, I used my typewriter letter stamps to make the little sayings on these:

This shows the cards I made from the watercolor project

This was so much fun and now I have handmade cards ready to give to my loved ones this Valentines Day.

If you try it, please send me a pic!  I’d love to see your rendition of this project.

ALSO, if you have any questions, please respond to this email and I’ll be happy to help in any way I can.  Happy painting!

 

NEW IN PERSON CLASSES

Come Paint with me at Kitsap Art Center, friends!  Here are 2 opportunities in March:

March 7th from 10am – noon we will be painting these adorable sheep.  Click HERE for the info and to sign up.

This pic shows three Suffolk sheep in watercolor

March 21st from 10am – noon we will be painting this sweet bird.  Click HERE for the info and to sign up.

this shows a little red breasted bird in watercolor

That’s all for now folks!  I hope you are playing art when you can!

Kimberly Snider, Virtuoso, Signing off

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