Another batch of watercolors!
Day 6 – Spider in a web.
Day 7 – Lavender
Day 8 – Sunset
Day 9 – A flower that attracts bees. Not sure the name.
I’ve fallen behind on posting my daily watercolor paintings. Below are days two through five.
Day 2 – End scene of Inception.
Day 3 – End scene of Inception redone.
Day 4 – Strawberries for the Fourth of July.
Day 5 – Luke’s shop sign from Gilmore Girls.
World Watercolor Month – Day 1 – finished yesterday!
Two attempts at one scene from Mad Max: Fury Road. I don’t think I’ll be using the prompts for this month’s challenge.
July is World Watercolor Month, which means a 31 day watercolor challenge. I’m excited to be participating this year!
More information can be found here if anyone else would like to participate. The site Doodlewash will be pulling in watercolor paintings across all social media that use the tag #WorldWatercolorMonth. Check here throughout the month to see artwork from participants around the world!
Happy painting!
World Watercolor Month. Fury Road WIP.
My mom has always loved mushrooms, even when she was a kid. Growing up there were quite a few mushroom themed items in our home. Last year for Mother’s Day I used my mom’s love of cute fungi as inspiration for her gift. I used watercolor paint to create a mushroom painting trio for her home office. This gift gave me the chance to use a push mat board cutter, which is pretty exciting when you want the ability to create your own mat board frames for cheaper than a craft store would charge you. Or maybe I’m the only person who gets excited about things like that? The steps below mainly outline how I created the mat board frames for the paintings.
Be sure to share pictures of your framed watercolor paintings with me on Instagram – @reminiscentrain
Happy painting!
During one of my many Pinterest pinning sprees I came across a series of photos that showed how to turn a t-shirt into a cat tent. I thought it was the cutest thing, but couldn’t find any step-by-step instructions. Below are the steps I took to recreate the picture collage I had seen.
Share pictures of your cat tents with me on Instagram – @reminiscentrain
Happy upcycling!
If you ever get the chance to attend a BYOB (bring your own beverage) painting class, you should go! I highly recommend them. They are a great way to relax, have fun, and get out of any art slump you might be in.
Recently, I attended a couples BYOB painting class. The theme was the Chicago Skyline stylized to mimic Van Gogh’s Starry Night. It was a great subject for a couples project. Normally, in one of these classes you walk away with your own stand-alone painting (example here), but with a couples painting class it is slightly different. As you can guess both people paint their own canvas, which afterwards come together to form a complete image. The fun/challenging part is getting both canvases to match up and appear cohesive.
I won’t take you through the whole process in detail since that is boring and painting should be a fun organic experience.
Tips: I tend to blend my colors a lot right on the canvas and had to constantly remind myself that I needed choppy short strokes to match Van Gogh’s style. Having the reference image handy helped as a reminder. In order to keep the skyline and swirl flowing correctly from one canvas to the next we kept the canvases touching when adding the white swirl and blocking out the skyline.
At a high level the process looked like this, start with the background first. Once all the blue paint is applied (even to the sides of the canvas) take white paint and start adding where the stars, moon, and swirl should go (it helped us to keep the canvases together at this point). Once that’s all dry, add warm colors (yellow, orange, red) over the top of the white. Add reflections and ripples to the water. Now comes the Chicago Skyline being blocked out in black paint (another good point to have your canvases together). Once dry, add white and yellow highlights for sides of the buildings and windows. Touch up anything you want and add your signature. Finally, place the canvases right next to each other, take a step back, admire your masterpiece and cheers to a job well done!
If you’ve ever taken a BYOB painting class or are thinking about it let me know in the comments below or share your work with me on Instagram – @reminiscentrain
Happy Painting!
Since joining the website Goodreads I’ve taken on the annual Reading Challenge. It seems most bookworms I’ve met have an annual reading goal in some capacity. Knocking books off the ever-growing TBR pile is a constant struggle, especially if you’ve ever challenged yourself to a “Top 100” list. Five years ago my boyfriend challenged himself to finish one of these lists within a five-year period. It’s taken slightly longer than he would have liked but just this month he has completed the challenge by reading the last book on the list – War & Peace. This is quite the accomplishment! Check out the list he completed here and see how many you’ve read.
I searched the internet for a certificate of completion to present to him when he finally finished and found nothing. I was seriously disappointed. So what does a bookish nerd with a background in graphic media do? Roll up her sleeves and open Adobe Illustrator to start creating her very own. [at the end of the article there are download links to finished certificates for personal use only]
I used Adobe Illustrator to create the certificate. I prefer Illustrator over Photoshop. This way I can scale my custom graphics however and whenever I feel like it without worrying about resolution degradation.
Creating the certificate using Adobe Illustrator.
What’s a certificate without a shiny gold sticker? I used Adobe Illustrator again to create a template of what I wanted on the Avery Inkjet Gold Notarial Seals (2 inch diameter). I purchased the gold stickers through Amazon. My final product was to be printed on 8.5″ x 11″ paper and that’s what I based my designs and seal size off of. Once the sticker template was printed and cut into a circle I centered it over one of the stickers, taped in place, and used the embossing stylus to outline the template. You need to outline the template quite a few times. Lift up the template periodically to make sure you are leaving a mark on the gold sticker.
Once that is finished I added it to the printed certificate and then filled out the blank spaces. To make this joke gift more official I framed it before presenting it to my boyfriend. He was very surprised!
If you’d like to surprise any bookworms you know for completing their reading challenge, download one of the following certificates! Let me know how this turns out if you create your own. I’d love to see the final version! Comment below or tag me on Instagram – @reminiscentrain
*NOTE: The file format is a .png with transparency; if you open up in the browser you might see a checkered “background”. This won’t print checkered, it just means there is no background color so it will print faster.
Red :: Blue :: Yellow :: Green :: Multi-colored
If you have any interest in a custom certificate for a small fee, just shoot me an email reminiscentrain@gmail.com
Happy reading my fellow bookworms!!
May was my one year anniversary with my amazing boyfriend. I wasn’t sure what to get him as a gift. I had been searching and trying to think up something meaningful and homemade, but I couldn’t come up with anything for awhile. Then I came across the “Five Senses Gift.” This means you give five gifts, each specific to one of the five senses. I was intrigued and the more examples I saw I decided this was the route I was going to take. I wouldn’t have enough time to make all five gifts and decided Sight and Taste would be homemade and the rest retail.
The “big” homemade gift was for the sense, Sight. I illustrated with pen and watercolor a collage representing some of the year’s highlights. Below is a sketch of the illustration, finished product, and a couple close ups. It was really fun looking through all my photos from the past year and deciding on what items to include in the collage.
I have to admit, I really like wrapping presents. It’s like another art project. I made tags for each present (below) denoting which present was for what sense.
The five sense gifts were:
Touch – Shirt
Smell – Cologne
Taste – Homemade cookies
Sight – Illustrated memory collage
Sound – Fun guitar picks
My boyfriend was really surprised and enjoyed everything. If you are looking for a fun gift theme I would recommend this!
While on vacation in Cancun, Mexico this January I was able to go “shelling.” It was so much fun walking up and down the beach seeing what little treasures washed up on shore. I was able to find a lot of really cool pieces and brought them home. The problem was I didn’t know where or how to put them on display. I decided in a mason jar would be the best place and glass etching cream to write “Cancun, Mexico 2016” would be a good way to label it.
Shells and materials:
Planning the text:
Waiting for the cream to dry:
Finished:
