I recently
completed a project for one of my close friends. She asked me to
create some typography art she could frame (as a gift for another
friend) – a Bible verse with a watercolour background.
She had a couple
different verses in mind as options, and a general idea of what the
background might look like. So, I used Photoshop to come up with a
few visuals to help her decide what she liked best. These two are my
favourites:
My friend ended
up liking that second one best as well, with just a few
modifications. :)
Now it was on to
the real thing. CONFESSION: I am not an expert in watercolours! (They
are actually not listed on my website as an “available medium.”)
But, I decided to give it a go anyway. It took me three tries, but I
was able to create one that she loved! Below are what all three
attempts look like:
If you are a
watercolour novice as well, I hope you will be able to benefit from
some of the things I discovered. Please read on... :)
My first
background ended up looking fine, but there were two problems: First,
the purple was much too pink. (One of the modifications my friend
requested was that the purple have more navy in it.) The purple I
mixed up on my pallette looked great, but it ended up looking quite
different when I got it on the paper. Even testing out my colour on a
scrap of the same kind of paper did not help much – I guess because
a few quick brushstrokes makes the colour come out darker than when I
spread it across the whole entire paper. The second problem was that
it ended up being much to dark. I knew that black lettering would not
stand out at all.
For my second
attempt, I added more water to the paint to make it thinner. This
made the colours lighter, but I soon realized that I needed to let
each layer dry before adding more paint on top! I started by putting
a thin layer of purple paint over the whole paper. I wanted to add
more layers over most of the paper, but leave the bottom with a more
faded look. When I kept adding more paint where I wanted it to be
darker – while the layers underneath were still wet – it hardly
made a difference. However, if I accidentally painted over where I
wanted it to stay light – where the layer underneath had already
dried – it actually went way darker! There was one point where I
thought I had sort of ruined it, but it ended up turning out in the
end. :)
For my third
attempt, I pulled out the trusty hair blow-dryer and actually dried
each layer before I added any more paint. This helped me control
things more, and I love the “ridged” look the blow-dryer gave it!
This background ended up being my favourite.
Guess which one
my friend liked best? Option 2!! Now all that was left was to add the
lettering. I love typography, so this was no problem. She wanted the
letters to be very simple and neat. Here's how it turned out:
She loved it! It
was exactly how she pictured it – I was so glad!
One more note for
those who are non-watercolour experts, like me: even though I used
super-thick watercolour paper, it still buckled a lot when it was
wet. Don't worry if this happens to you! It should flatten out by the
time it is dry. Even if it doesn't flatten out all the way at that
point, just put something a bit heavy on top (I used my watercolour
sketch pad), and everything should be fine. :)
Have any of you
had any adventures with mediums you weren't familiar with? Please
feel free to share them!
Alison
