TREE-mendous

Christmas trees are always colorful, but their foliage is usually only available in green. Which is fine in real life, but in art life, we might like to consider a few additional options. Luckily I have a nice palette of Ranger's Perfect Pearls, which, when mixed with a bit of water become the loveliest, sparkliest sheer watercolor paints you can imagine.

These trees were inspired by an Instagram post by @andrea.nelson.art in which she painted a piece of watercolor paper with streaky colors; then added some gold acrylic. After the sheet was dry, she hand-cut triangle trees, circle ornaments and funky letters. 

I followed her lead, but used my Perfect Pearls as the paints. (Note, when mixed with water, you don't need to use Perfect Medium and the PPs do not need to be "set" afterward!) Since I knew I wanted to make a bunch, my trees are slightly larger and diecut with Memory Box's Marvelous Pine die. (It's retired... sorry ...but literally ANY tree die; or the aforementioned handcut triangles, will work really well.)

I went with four colorways: Pink (obviously!), Purple, Blue and ok yeah Green is admittedly a nice color for trees, so why not? I used multiple shades of each color and painted them in random stripey swooshes. I initially left a bit of white on each panel so that, when the colors were dry, I could come back in with Perfect Gold. (You can add the gold while your colors are wet, but I felt it stood out more when done as a separate step.) 

After all the panels were dry, I did the diecutting; and now they are ready to be used in... a couple of very cut projects I will show you later this week! ;)

PS: If you haven't seen @andrea.nelson.art in action, I insist you hop over and check out a post or two. In addition to being a fantastic artist (and a very good teacher!) she's a sunny, bubbly, sparkly person and her videos are fast, fun, colorful and inspiring. (Warning: there's a pretty good chance you'll get hooked on watercolor and want to make EVERYTHING she demos ASAP, so plan accordingly lol!)