Climbing Rose Card

Snipped off a climbing rose today, and tried my hand at watercoloring it. I first used a watercolor pencil to create an outline of the image on Arches Cold Press watercolor paper. I then began painting the image with my Schmincke watercolors. I didn’t capture the painting process as I’m a little rusty, but I did have fun adding yellows and purple tones to the red tones. Once I had the base done, I felt the need to turn to my Prismacolor pencils to brighten the reds and cool down other parts of the image. Before doing that I used a little black pen on the edges. Here’s the original flower and before pencil stage:

So, next step was to add a little orange and white, poppy red and purples to the image with pencils, and paint in some leaves. The pencils ended up adding a nice texture to the petals. After I added the leaves I decided to add a muted background, and this is where I ended up:

I think I played around with the flower a little more with pencils to make the reds pop even more and with the leaves, and then, I added more background interest with watercolors. I also added black and white dylusions ink by tapping the ends of the spray bottle tops over the image. Finally, I spattered a bit of gold Perfect Pearls that I had wet down with a brush. This this was the result:

Finally, I decided to make a card with this image. I had to use a 6x6 card base to capture the whole image. I found some paper I thought matched and used black card stock to back everything. I added black Nuvo drops and a sentiment from Unity’s Forest Butterfly kit. My friend had encouraged me to get back to watercoloring. So, this card was created for my friend and their family members who are dealing with a tough cancer battle with a sibling.

Hope the explanation of my process helped in lieu of a video. I will try soon to get back to recording my efforts. Let me know what you think of the end result. Thanks for stopping by, till next time, happy crafting.