Watercoloring Doves and Holly

Great minds think a like! I had no idea that Tuesdays challenge was watercoloring when I was working on my card for todays post. It's Asela again and I'd love to share how I watercolored this gorgeous image Dove and Holly using watercolor pencils. You will need pencils in these colors (or similar to these) Ultramarine, Peacock Blue, Dark Green, Crimson Red, Terra Cotta and Sunburst Yellow. I also used a round Sable brush and clean water. For the paper I

used Flourishes Classic White paper. Versmamark and Detail Black Embossing Powder were used to create the image for coloring.

Stamp the image twice using Versamark and then heat embossing it with detail black Embossing powder. It's important to use DETAIL embossing powder on this image. The illustration has a lot of fine lines and you don't want to lose them when you melt the powder. Regular power will be too thick.

When I watercolor I always like to wet the areas that I will be coloring first using clean water and my brush. This way when I start to add color to the areas they will bleed out into the areas that I wet and the colors will be soft. When you

watercolor always think of going light to dark. You can't remove color, but you can always add more color to make an area darker.

I wet my brush and then touch it to the tip of the watercolor pencil. I make sure to scrub the brush on the tip of the pencil. This picks up the pigment and then I can apply it to the paper. If you use an Aquapainter brush make sure to dab the tip on a napkin to remove some of the water, it may be really soaking wet. Since I wet the areas that I want to color first with water if you don't remove some of the water off of the Aquapainter brush you may soak the fibers of the paper too

much and cause it to bleed out side of the lines.

Watercolor around the outside of the birds and the holly. Color in the berries red. This yellow is very bright but you will mute it by adding Terra cotta over some of it. This will create an antiqued look.

Add the Terra cotta a little bit at a time, lightly wetting the paper. Since this is NOT watercolor paper it may warp a bit because it isn't that thick. I apply plenty of glue on the backside when I adhered it to the red panel. Or you can lightly wet the back side and place it between 2 sheets of white paper and set heavy books on it overnight.

Color in the 2 birds first using the lighter blue and then adding the darker blue for shading.

Cut out the smaller bird and adhere it to the larger stamped image using dimensional tape.

Cut out the bird, a panel measuring approximately 4 x 3 inches. Sponge around the edges with a mustard color dye ink. Adhere to a red panel that is 1/8 inches larger around then the bird panel. Create a card base that is 4 1/2 x 4 1/4 (folded size). Add scrapbooking paper and embellishments. Adhere panel to the front of card leaving 1 inch above the fold of the card base. Paper pierce one corner.

I have really enjoyed being a part of Flourishes team this month and I hope

that you enjoyed my tutorials. Thanks for all the sweet comments!

I have included one last PDF file of this tutorial for you to print out and save.

Download Dove and Holly Tutorial Flourishes