Watercolour and Whimsy

Last year I taught a class called watercolour and whimsy. The watercolour part focused on colour mixing and how to limit your palette and get cohesive results. The whimsy part included stenciling and doodling. The truth is we spent most of our time on the watercolour leaving little time for the whimsy.

I have gone back to my panels to finish the doodling details. Most were done on cold press watercolour paper with a mix of pan paints and tube paints. For each panel I chose several colours that would not necessarily look great together straight out of the pan/tube but with some mixing ending up looking like they were born to be together. This first one is a favourite. I love the way a deep green, a purple, an orangey red and a blue ended up looking so good together.

I did most of the doodling with a white gel pen with some black sharpie underneath here and there for more contrast. I have more cards to share made as part of the same class. The watercolour colour mixing part of the process is very relaxing and enjoyable. I haven’t added sentiments to either of these cards but I can add one before sending if I wish.

On the panel above and below, I painted again with a limited palette but touched each brush stroke to a previous stroke so that colours flowed into each other. The result was blends, watermarks and harder lines.

To add some whimsy I blended black ink through fern stencils. They are homemade stencils created die-cutting into grafix stencil film with dies from the Moda Scrap ‘fern die set‘.

Once the black ink was dry I doodled different patterns on the fronds with white gel pens. This post includes affiliate links from Foiled Fox. If you buy through these links I receive a small commission at no extra cost to you.