Nothing says Spring to me quite the way tulips do and I have been loving all of the pretty flowers I see each time I step into the grocery store. They seem the perfect subject for a page in my sketchbook and I created a quick tutorial so you could join me!

The photo reference below is of some artificial tulips that I use to decorate with each spring:
Following general shapes, I drew individual flowers and leaves starting with the one closest to me and then adding the rest behind the last flower I drew until I had an odd number of blooms arranged on the page. If you follow the number order, you'll see where I started, what I drew first, second and so on:
I splashed paint using yellows, pinks, lavenders and coral for the blooms along with greens, yellows, blues, violets  and teal for the leaves. The stems have yellow and green:
Next, I used a piece of tracing paper to draw a simple outline around the outer-most edge of my tulips before carefully cut out around the shapes to create a mask:
Using a cardboard stencil, I then added the polka dots into the background. You'll note that the header, Happy Spring also shows up in this image—I forgot to take a photo!:
Using a cosmetic sponge, I dabbed paint from the palette to paint the dots. It is very important to use just enough water to get the paint to the sponge. The puddle of color should be mostly pigment. It will have a consistency of heavy cream. If you use too much water and the sponge gets too wet, the color will leak under the stencil and the edges will not be crisp and sharp:
You can either hold the tracing paper mask down or you can tape it down. Position the stencil and begin to dab color into the openings. It may take more than one application of paint to get to the level of color you want. Be careful not to let the sponge get over-saturated. If it becomes too wet, set it aside and grab another one.

Once everything is dry, go back and fix any edges that may not be to your liking and then add your header or text. Consider using a coordinating color like a darker green or pink rather than black.

Last go back and strengthen the outlines around the tulips to give them more energy:
Using broken lines as well as varying the line weight (thick vs. thin) gives the tulips a more dynamic feel than just the simple outline I started out with.

I hope you can join me at Keeton's down in Bradenton for the class on Saturday, April 25 and we'll paint tulips together!

A couple of weekends ago, hubby and I headed up to Ocala where they have two stores that Tampa does not—a Gander Mountain and a Hobby Lobby! Something for everyone! It turned out to be a nice day away as Ocala is horse country with lots of rolling hills and gorgeous oak trees. We managed to get "lost" once and didn't even bother to turn around because we were enjoying the views so much.

Anyway, while wandering the aisles of Hobby Lobby, I stumbled across a Sharpie® Liquid Pencil. Hmmm, I thought. I gotta give this a whirl. I mean liquid pencil—would it smear like regular pencil? Would this eliminate the problem of broken leads let alone having a sharpener? I could see potential here so I chucked one into my basket.

A few aisles over, I stumbled across the Chatterbox Journaling Genie which is a fancy name for a stencil. A stencil used to draw lines quickly on the journal page so that your text will be straight! These have apparently been around for the last 10 years, but I just found out about them.

I liked the idea of a quick way to get lines on the page without having to get a ruler and measure each line, especially for when I'm traveling. What I wasn't liking was the full page of stencils. So, I did a little surgery.
I even rounded some of the corners so they wouldn't scratch me and I could use the shape of the stencil as a  template to draw boxes on my journal page. The last thing I did was to glue an envelope in the back of my sketchbook so I could stow the templates and take them out as needed.
As for the Sharpie Liquid Pencil? Don't bother! It looks and writes more like a pen than a pencil. It leaves an indention in the paper with even the lightest of touches and it requires an even amount of pressure to get the liquid "lead" to come out.
The stuffed puppy on the right is a baby toy and he barks when you squeeze his tummy. For some reason, he reminds me of my sweet cinnamon girl, Gatlin, that I lost to cancer a few years ago. You can see the stenciled lines in action over on the left with a Copic® gray marker.

The one thing I will say for the liquid pencil was that I was able to erase most of the lead after the watercolor was complete. I tried some more tests with it on other types of paper and different paints, but did not have similar results. Oh well! You don't know if you don't try!!

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!