Sunny Hello – Painting with stamps

I have a mini tutorial today showing you how I “paint with stamps”. Sometimes I want to change something on the stamp I am using, perhaps add a stem or leaf, or leave something out. It is possible to do this with masking or, if I am watercolouring and the initial stamped image will be pale and watery it is possible to wipe some of the ink off the stamp before I stamp it onto my panel.

The photo above shows how I tape my watercolour card base down to prevent too much warping when it gets wet. I cut the card base to the finished size to begin with; the tapes create a border for the finished picture. After taping I painted water onto the panel.

I inked the sunflower heads with memento cantaloupe ink and stamped them three times. I used a pale colour because I was creating an outline image to paint.  Before stamping the top and bottom flowers I wiped a bit of ink off the centre of the flower to allow me to change the flower a little when adding colour later.  The leaves are inked with memento bamboo leaves ink. Rather than cut masks for the leaves I inked the stamp then wiped off the ink where it was likely to overlap with another leaf. I began adding colour to the petals with a brush, picking up ink from a watercolour pencil. I painted all the petals in yellow with fairly loose brush strokes not worrying if the colour stayed inside the lines.

When adding the colour to the petals you can see I left an oval space on the top flower where I wanted to change the shape of the dark centre. I kept the waterbrush nice and wet as I painted to create a watery blended effect on the petals. When I was happy with the yellow petals I reinked the petals on the stamp with memento tangelo ink, stamped over the colouring I had done and blended a bit more with colour from an orange pencil.

The stamp features petals which cover most of the flower’s centre as you can see in the middle flower. I did not want the flowers to be identical so I drew an oval centre on two of the flowers with watercolour pencil. I blended the darker colour and added definition by dipping the pencil tip into water before drawing with it.

I painted the leaves the same way picking up colour from a watercolour pencil with a wet paintbrush. I added more colour to the lowest leaf which is shadowed by the other too. When the flowers were almost dry I painted water around the edge of the petals then added blue to the background area blending with water to fade it out on the right hand side.

I am not very happy with the arrangement of my flowers. The poor things need stems! Its as though they have heads and shoulders but no necks! I wouldn’t follow my example in the layout of the images if I were you, but I hope you have fun with the technique.

Supplies:
Stamps:  Sunny Hello (Penny Black)
Inks: Memento Cantaloupe, Tangelo, Bamboo Leaves (Tsukineko) 
Pencils: Albrecht Durer Light Orange 113, Orange yellow 109, Indian Red 192, True Blue, 148, Moss Green 168 (Faber-Castell)
Cardstock: Fabriano 100% cotton hot pressed watercolour paper