Holiday Project

This season I decided to give a handmade gift to my friends and family. I made some watercolor poinsettias to keep the theme inside the holiday spirits.

At first my idea was to make bookmarks, since I’ve been practicing clouds on those. But Dirk mentioned that they would look good on the Christmas tree as well. So they became both, a bookmark and a tree decoration. 

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Hi friends, for this holiday season I decided to challenge myself and further learn with watercolor by doing this poinsettias. They are called “Noche Buena” in spanish and they happen to be my mom’s favorite flower. ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ ✨ ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ I’ve always wanted to do watercolor process video like my favorite artist Heikala. Thus, this video happened. And I’m very happy how it turned out. I’ll upload the finished pictures later. After this I added gold ink for some details.⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ ✨ ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ I looked for royalty free music and found a great library at @artlist.io and used the free trial of @splice_app to put it all together. All from my phone! ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ ✨ ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ Enjoy the holiday season!!

A post shared by Twitch.tv/merikkuma (@merikkumaa) on Dec 22, 2019 at 12:31pm PST

I’ve been practicing with clouds for over two months now and recently switched to a florals. I took photos of flowers on our Tequila weekend trip and started drawing those. Then one day Dirk brought to the house a beautiful poinsettia which sparked this idea.

I used Strathmore Watercolor cold press paper (140 lb / 300g) and since I didn’t want to finish my Windsor & Newton half pan red, I switched to the tubes I used to learn watercolor for the first time when I was 8 years old! This brand is called REEVES, I don’t know if they are in the market anymore. But to my surprise they still work! So I’m going to add those tubes to my future practice with clouds and flowers.

I first did a sketch in pencil and went over it with watercolor proof ink. After painting all the poinsettias I added details on the leaves and on the center of each flower with golden ink. I cut them all and then laminated them to give them a layer of protection. At the back side of each flower it says the date, a greeting and my signature. After laminating them I had to cut them all again but this time leaving a little of the clear film so the ribbon can be attached.

I learned a lot on this project and I look forward to the next holiday season.