Date: 2009-11-07 22:11 Subject: Watercolor on Crane Paper Public Mood: sleepy Tags: art, homemade stationary, watercolor

Remember yesterday's post where I reviewed Crane & Co. stationary, and mentioned that the thick cotton paper took watercolor extremely well?

The sheets of Crane paper are blank, and although the paper is nice, I decided to spruce it up a bit using my Sakura Brush Pen -- I was going for a Far Eastern brush drawing sort of look.

Well, that ended up going out the window; I only have one brush pen, and I'm not very good with it (Inkophile is much better -- though, granted, she does have an actual brush pen with bristles, unlike mine which has a felt tip...lame). But I could control the line variation a little bit, and liked the look of the image that came from using a brush pen.
But it was still a bit too dull, just black ink against an ivory-cream background. I decided that adding watercolors would fix that, and make it more interesting. And, what do you know -- it did :^)


Done with Sakura Brush Pen and Winsor & Newton Cotman Water Colours

After the watercolors had dried, I used a gold glittery gel pen to highlight the tail feathers; if you look closely, you might be able to tell that it's glittery.



I really like how it came out, especially the contrasting effect of yellow-gold tail feathers glittering against the flat watercolor image when you hold it at an angle. Plus, I had a ton of fun doing it. It was quick and easy and I wasn't going for detailed perfection -- casual coloring looked good for this image, I thought. It looked even better after adding in the glitter pen embellishments.

Which is why I proceeded to do about 5 more, all with different designs.

More to come!