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Green "branchy" background added to purple ornament card.
Painting Christmas Cards

Painting Christmas Cards

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Happy Winter Solstice! It’s the shortest day of the year so we’re on to longer days now. Yay! The shorter days make it a bit dreary sometimes but I decided to create some Christmas cards to cheer myself up. I saw this method on numerous posts and videos online so I can’t credit one person for the idea. This method makes it fairly simple to create ornaments or baubles for a card with watercolors.

Artist's workbench with watercolor set up for creating cards, including palettes, brushes, water and paint rimmed jar.

Here’s my set up in the studio. I had several palettes of paint and it works best with two brushes I found. I didn’t use the very thin detail brush until the end. Also, two sources of water, one kept clean, work well too. I found a couple of glass jars in different sizes that would work on my 5″ x 7″ cards.

Glass jar rim being painted with red watercolor paint.

Get some “juicy” watercolor on to the edge of the glass jar and print it on to your paper or card.

Using clean wet watercolor brush to "grab" red color from edge of printed circle.

Then quickly add clean water around the edge to get the paint moving. You can also use your other “juicy” brush to add in more color while the paper is still wet. Remember to leave some white spots for the “shine” on the ornament.

Using gold gel pen to add ornament top to purple round ornament.

I painted sixteen of these in four different colors. This photo shows using a gold gel pen to add the ornament top and string.

Four pieces of watercolor paper with painted ornaments in a variety of colors.

Here’s what the cards looked like after that. I wanted to add something in the background or something more festive. I started with the “gold” ones.

Golden ornaments decorated with pine greenery and splatters.

I added greenery and some splatters. But I wasn’t particularly happy with the look.  It’s okay but I decided to try something different on the other colors.

Green background added to red ornament card.

I started with the red ornaments, added water to the background and dropped in some green paint. Okay, but still not exactly what I wanted.

Green "branchy" background added to blue ornament card.

I changed my green color and then worked on trying to make the background look more like pine branches. This was looking better.

Green "branchy" background added to purple ornament card.

So I finished out the purple ornaments in the same way. Then I glued them down to a regular 5″ x 7″ greeting card with Yes Paste. I have found that is the easiest glue method with cards/paper. So now, my Christmas cards are off in the mail. It was a fun activity and really pretty simple. If you want to try it, there are quite a few YouTube videos showing the process.

The First Quarter Color Challenge

The First Quarter Color Challenge

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I’ve been playing with the color wheel in fiber and paints for our first quarter challenge.

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When I made the samples for the fiber color wheel I started out using my fingers to blend them.  It took a while to get them to look like they were supposed to.  (I apologize for the photos and the shadows.)

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Since  I needed more of the secondary colors to make the tertiary colors, I decided to use the dog brushes.  I wasn’t getting the results I wanted.  So, I decided to use the carder to make a bigger amount then to move on to blending tints.

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Secondary orange then on to adding white, then black for tints.

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I stopped with the reds.  You can see the outward progression with each color group blending red with white, then red with black then down the line doing the same.  Some of the colors look a little reddish brown.

Once I finished the red group I wanted to try paints.  It was actually a little harder than I expected.  On the left side is the acrylic, the right is watercolor.

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When I started the project with fiber I was in Florida with my grandson who wanted to help me.  Here is his secondary blending.

2015-03-05 15.56.29Not bad for a five year old!  Had he spent more than five minutes with me, he probably would have done a better job than Grandma.

Have you tried the first quarter challenge?   We’d love to see your results on the forum www.feltandfiberstudio. proboards.com