The Daily ATC Challenge: Day 13

Today’s theme for the Daily ATC Challenge is: SNOWFLAKES

They’re beautiful and it’s January, so why not? Both of mine are watercolor on 140lb paper, however the second, darker one also has a bit of faint 6H pencil. Basically, I decided I didn’t like the first one and did the second one late last night so I’d have something better to share this morning!

The faint one was made by doing a blue wash, letting that dry mostly, and then scrubbing out the snowflakes with a damp brush. Additionally, before it was dry, I dripped on some clean water for additional effect.

The darker snowflake was first drawn on sketch paper using circle stencils, a protractor to get my wheels into sixths, and then just a good deal of pencil sketching. When the sketch was complete, I traced the lines I wanted with a very soft pencil, I think an 8B. Then I flipped my sketchpad ATC over onto the watercolor paper blank ATC and went at the back of the sketchpad ATC as though it were a scratch ticket. The design transferred beautifully, though reversed of course which doesn’t matter for a snowflake. Since the paper had slid a bit with my scratching vigor, I traced the bold, dark lines with a 6H pencil to get very faint, but slightly depressed into the paper lines for my outline. Then I went over the entire sheet of watercolor paper gently with a polymer eraser. The eraser took off all the bold, dark pencil from the transfer process but left the pale hard pencil lines intact. At that point I was able to start outlining my snowflake in watercolor with a very fine nail art brush and use a larger brush with clean water to spread the outline away from the snowflake in a wash. I worked my way around the snowflake four times, each time outlining a little less and spreading the outline a bit less. Ultimately, that left me with my white snowflake which has more blue around the center background than the other parts. This would have been a million times more easily completed with Frisket, but since I’m allergic to latex, I try to stay far, far away from that stuff!

Tags: art, artist, ATC, blue, card, cold, daily, dailyATC, farm, maple, maplewoolfarm, painting, sketch, snow, snowflake, trading, watercolor, watercolors, white, winter, wool

You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.