DIY Watercolor Patterns and Festive Garland

Hello! Today our contributor Jessica Rebelo is back with her first project for the new year. I can already see this DIY garland at a bright and colorful Spring birthday party. Also, I love how one of Jessica's New Year resolutions was to learn a new creative skill, and clearly she's off to a great start. I myself started learning calligraphy while the power was out over Christmas, and I'm still into it. Have you set a creative resolution for 2014? If so, what is it?

Alright! Get out your watercolor palette, and share your pretty patterns with us when you're done!

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One of my New Year’s resolutions this year was to learn how to paint with watercolours. I have always been fascinated by the versatility of this beautiful medium, I also know how hard it is to completely master the skills to make something good. So I bought myself some nice materials for Xmas, prepare myself for the challenge and I started to give it a go.

I’m following these very helpful tutorials by the talented Yao Cheng, she makes everything looks so easy! I’m sticking with patterns combined with transparencies right now, it’s easy, the effect it’s beautiful and the possibilities endless. I practiced and experimented for a few days and ended having a few sheets covered with patterns, I though it would be nice to create something beautiful with them.

A garland was the perfect choice, it’s timeless, always brings some personality and colour to any room and it’s so easy to make. I hope you enjoy this project and fall in love with watercolours too!

Materials:

• Watercolours
• Water Colour paper
• Glittered paper (optional)
• Brushes (flats and rounded/different sizes)
• Scissors
• Hole punch
• Circle punch (optional)
• Compas
• Baker twine (or another thin cord)

Step by step:

1 & 2) Using different kind of brushes (and colours) start experimenting different patterns in the paper. I mixed geometric shapes, brush strokes and organic shapes like leaves. If you want some inspiration this Pinterest board might help.

(Tip: If you are overlapping colours for a transparency effect I learnt that leaving it dry for a long time works best, I would say an hour, otherwise the colours would blend)

3) Once you have lots of patterns in paper (I ended having 13 but it’s up to you how long or big your garland will look) trace circles with the compass around each pattern. I made two sizes: 5cm and 8cm.

4) With a circle punch (or scissors) cut different colour’s shapes to add in between the watercolours. This step is optional, if you want to use other kind of solid colour paper it will have a similar effect.

5 & 6) With a regular hole punch make holes in each circle where the cord will go through (I made two for the biggest circles).

7 & 8) Position your shapes in the order you like and when you are happy start inserting them through the cord and voilà!

X
Jessica