WATERCOLOR-DEMO AND A GOOD USE FOR A FAILED PAINTING

There are many ways to decorate a gift box with your artistic endeavors.  Not the least of which is simply doing a painting directly on plain gift wrap paper.  But, here I'll show you a way to decorate a gift box and give a failed painting a new life at the same time.  Before I do that, however, here's a little demo of the painting I eventually wound up using on the gift box.  Hey, we all goof sometimes.  I goof a lot, so I've learned that I might as well make the best of it.  LOL...




Colors Used:
Windsor Newton French Ultramarine Blue
Windsor Newton Alizarin Crimson
Windsor Newton Olive Green
Windsor Newton Aureolin (Yellow)




1)  I was just playing around with a scrap of watercolor paper and wanted to see what it would be like to put shadows into my painting by using an underglaze first.  After drawing the two tulips below I added an undercoat glaze of French Ultramarine Blue in the areas of the painting that I wanted to be the darkest.  Knowing the flowers would eventually be pink I used a blue/purple (French Ultramarine Blue and Alizarin Crimson) underglaze and I used the French Ultramarine Blue under the darkest parts of the green stems and leaves as you can see here below.

2)  Next as you can see in this photo I added my pinks (Alizarin Crimson with lots of water) and greens (mixture of Olive Green and Aureolin Yellow) on top of the underglaze and began to also add further glazes with the pinks and greens as I went along one petal and one stem/leaf at a time.  If you notice you can still see the French Ultramarine Blue underglaze under the green watercolor on the leaves in this photo.  It's especially apparent in the front leaf closest to the bottom of the paper.

3)  By step three shown below I've completed all my top glazes so that the underglaze no longer shows through.  I've been able to keep my colors fresh because I haven't had to put blue/purple glazes on top of my pure pink and green watercolor to define my shapes.  We've hidden them, those blues and purples, underneath our fresh top layers of glaze.  

4)  This step doesn't look much different than the last one, but if you look at the two very closely you'll see that in the photo below there are crisp, well defined edges on all the petal and leaf shapes.  (I haven't been able to capture it as well on the photograph as I would have liked to, unfortunately.)  For me it's a finishing touch that I often use because I like the effect so much.  I do it by choosing edges and darker curves to accent with very sharp Prismacolor pencils in a darker color.  (Perhaps one of these days I'll do a demo on just that alone.)

5)  If you happened to notice in any of the demo photos above I did a very careless thing.  I originally sketched the tulips so close to the top and left edge of the paper that I couldn't possibly frame this painting.  It was a good painting lesson, however, and I had fun doing it so no harm done, really.  Luckily, it occurred to me that I was getting ready to send a very good friend of mine her birthday gift.  It's hard to send boxes with bows on them through the mail unless you put it in a larger box with lots of protection around the bow, etc.  So, I was looking for an easy alternative.  Knowing she's always loved the color pale pink I decided to wrap her gift with plain pink wrapping paper.  I then cut out and added my tulips and a butterfly to the package and viola! 

I could have added a paper lace doily under the tulips etc., but I decided to leave it plain because the contents were not plain in pattern at all.  In this case the wrapping set the tone for the gift inside which was a set of four very busy pink floral cloth place mats with matching napkins and napkin rings.  She was delighted with the whole thing and seemed especially happy with the handmade gift wrap and greeting card that I'd added to it.  I was happy to have found a use for my failed painting and would probably purposely do this again on a gift box, maybe adding a handmade card of the same motif to it.  Well, I hope I've given you an idea for turning a painting "mistake" into something useful.