Dramatic Background with Water Colors

Today’s class of the “Simply Watercolor Christmas” course (from Online Card Classes) was called “Dramatic Backgrounds” where we were to use metallic or white paint over a dark background. This card design is a combination of ideas from today’s lesson and from an earlier lesson on masking with liquid masking fluid.

Using the graphite transfer technique, I transferred the tree and merry image (that was included in the course materials) to my water color paper and covered the image and greeting with liquid masking fluid. (I could have just painted my gold images directly over my background as shown in today’s lesson, but I wanted to practice the masking and transfer techniques I hadn’t yet tried from lessons 2 and 3.)

After the masking fluid was completely dry, I created my dark background with several layers of paint from my Kuretake GANSAI TAMBI Water Colors (# 56 Forest Green, 52 Hooker’s Green, and 20 Black). Once the background was complete, I used a toothbrush to splatter # 90 gold paint all over it.

I then removed the mask and filled in the white areas with gold paint. Kristina and her guest instructors make painting/brush control look so easy – lol!

I trimmed my finished panel down, mounted it on a plain piece of water color paper, and then adhered that to a heavy weight card base.

Thanks for checking out my card project!

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