Watercolor sprayed through a stencil Words and hard lines created with gel pens Click to enlarge

I saw an image (second image down on the post) on a blog the other day that captivated my imagination. I asked the owner of the blog how she created the image. The owner was none other than Sammie Kari of the Journal Girl blog. She answered right away with details and offered to do a video tutorial for me—you gotta love that! And she did. Here is the link to check it out.

Sammi used Adirondack Color Wash sprays to create her image. Not having any of those and really, really, really not wanting to add to my overloaded studio, I decided to see what would happen if I used watercolor and water in a sprayer/mister.

It worked great!

The only thing different I noticed was that achieving a level of color saturation that was comparable to the Adirondack sprays was difficult. My design is a bit on the light side. Altering my choice of pigments to a darker valued pigment or doing multiple layers of color, letting each dry, would also work. I think using a stencil with more complexity would also have helped.

In the image above, I used a teal blue and a light yellowish green. I would spray the stencil, pick it up, wipe it off*, and then reposition and spray again. After I was done with the stencil and the work had dried, I worked some of the green into the background. Later, after everything had dried, I doodled the words, and then added some lines to emphasize some of the swirls.

*In the video, Sammi shows how to use the ink/watercolor on the stencil to "print" a negative on another page—wish I'd of thought of that as I was doing my image!

I have no doubt this idea will be showing up in my work again soon as it was great fun and adds an interesting element to the page.

Now it's your turn to go play and have some fun!