January Planner Page

Hi everyone!  

It's the last day of 2016 and I treated myself to a quiet morning of watercolouring in my Planner... getting ready for the New Year.  I decided to use these pages as practise sessions for water colouring.

I wanted a "frosty" look to my January page... as these are the colours of winter in my part of the world.

These are the colours I used from the CTMH Watercolour Paint Set.

To prepare my page for colouring, I first painted it with a layer of clear gesso, as I knew I was going to be using a lot of water on it.  This ended up working well to keep the page fairly flat.  As I worked, and it dried, I kept flexing it and flattening it, and it dried very nicely.

I began in the center with January, and then I worked my way from the left upper corner over to the right, and the same for the bottom.  This kept me from dragging my hand through any wet paint.

I began with my lightest colours first and then added the darker colours.  I found I got better at painting as I got to the bottom.... I loosened up and was letting the paint fall where it wanted.  If it got too dark I added extra water and blended it out.  Sometimes I dabbed it with a paper towel to blot it up a bit... always with a "light" hand.  The nice thing about watercolouring is you can go back and fix things... so I went back and added extra depth here and there where I felt I had blended it out too much.  

To finish, I went all around the leaves with the lightest colour, adding lots of water to blend it out.  Once it dried, I added zentangle type accents with a white gel pen.

Thank you for stopping by and seeing what I'm up to today!  I hope the New Year brings you peace and prosperity!

Linda