Hey, Watercolor Wizards, Hajra here! So today we're making Valentine's
decorations using Beatrix Potter's lovely characters, so it's a combination
masters study, holiday project video. And these lovely bunny painting ornaments
will also be great for springtime, nursery, Easter, or Mother's Day. And stay
tuned till the end of this video, as I'll be doing a Valentine's Day watercolor
brush & metallic paint giveaway! As usual, art blogs, video note, sketches, Q and A's,
deconstructed painting posts, and art gift rewards are available for my
patrons on patreon! So I took a few hours to sketch up my for bunny drawings and I
covered my freehand drawing process and five total methods of drawing anything
in another video so be sure to check that out, too. I had the idea to do
Beatrix Potter studies because I saw that a new Peter Rabbit movie is coming
out which looks just horribly unfaithful to Beatrix Potter's characters and world
and stories, and if a movie studio wanted to make a funny slapstick rabbit movie
they should have just made up their own bunny characters instead of trying to
cash in on her famous characters in a totally mismatched movie. So I did 4
Beatrix Potter bunny studies total - 2 with with mother rabbit, one with Peter Rabbit,
and one with Benjamin bunny. I modified them so the scenes are Valentine's Day
appropriate but if you don't care for Valentine's Day you can make these into
springtime or Easter themed pieces or just studies of Beatrix Potter
characters. And the mother rabbit pieces would be lovely for Mother's Day as well.
I've drawn the illustration small and within particular shapes, because I plan
to glue them to wood blanks that I bought for 50 cents apiece at Joann's.
Because I'm going to glue and sand the paper edges for a perfect fit, I'm also
using the thinnest softest paintable paper I have and that's 90 pound BFK
Rives which is a soft sized, hundred percent cotton, printmaking paper. It's
also made by Arches and it's got an almost thin fabric feel to it, and it's
lovely for dry media or just ink, or ink and wash, or loose watercolor work in a
sort of one stroke Asian style. Because it's only internally sized, not
externally sized, you can't really lift paint much and it's not really for
tighter many-layered complicated work. So I've been inking the lines of my
sketches with my waterproof Zig writer marker in the sepia, dark brown color.
Because that line sinks in and saturates so much on this paper, it still reads
almost as black. If you have no wood blanks or any other support you can use
whatever shape paper works and any sort of paper type you want. I'm just using
my 90-pound bfk Rives because I bought a few big sheets some years ago and it
works really well for ornament paintings. I used a fine point side tip of the Zig
Writer marker for most of the illustrations, and I used a teeny 20/0
Spotter brush in areas where I needed an even finer line. Just scribble
a marker on your palette and dip the spotter brush in that scribbled ink and
paint with it! If you use a lot of water it'll get noticeably lighter in color, so
only use a teeny dab of water. Once I was done inking, it was really exciting
to get to the coloring part. Painting an inked piece is always a special unique
sort of fun--it's basically coloring in homemade coloring pages! I used the
tiniest porcelain palette I have. It turned out to be perfect for miniature
painting as the color swatches and puddles are not that big for miniature
paintings, and since I hadn't figured out how to use this teeny palette yet it was
a satisfying bonus to break it in on these bunny ornaments.
I used Inktense blocks; just shaved four of the colors right off the blocks into
the mini palette wells, and I used a mid primary red, yellow, and blue
along with some red-violet for vibrant Valentine's hearts. I like circular
palettes because they allow for lucid color wheel placement and color mixing
and this palette has plenty of wells to mix secondary colors and various
neutrals like browns and tans. I used Inktense because it's an excellent
choice for ornaments since Inktense is decently light fast and waterproof so
when I use a gloss varnish or glossy faux resin
over the colors they won't bleed. In the past I've used Dr. Phil Martin's Bombay
inks for this type of ornament painting as they are waterproof and light fast
inks, but I like the handling of Inktense much better. The Bombay inks tend to
bleed a lot more and be less amenable to subtle blends. Washy loose watercolor
painting over ink lines is perfect for this paper; if I'd done my own style of
original bunny ornaments it would have involved a lot more detail and layering
and then I probably wouldn't have wanted to use this BFK Rives paper--Arches
watercolor paper would have been the better choice. But these Beatrix Potter
bunny studies are just right for this paper, the ink work has some fine lines
but the color painting is far looser than my own style, so I don't have any
battles with the paper trying to layer on more details. Anytime I wanted a color
line to hold a sharp edge like a stripe or heart or solid fill shape area, I
worked wet on dry. But if I wanted a soft fuzzy edge, I applied water to that
section of the illustration first and then put in the paint wet into wet to
get that soft edge. Soft edges won't happen
naturally with water media, but on watercolor paper you can come back with
a damp brush too soften an edge or create a gradient like I do often with
Arches or Fabriano or other watercolor paper. The BFK Rives paper is also a hundred
percent cotton, but like I said it has no external sizing so the paint sinks in
right away so the only way to get a soft edge is to put water there first and
then apply the paint for a bleed. This is why I keep emphasizing that this paper
is awesome for dry media, ink, or ink and wash, but not for more complicated
watercolor painting that will require later lifting or later blending. Looking
at the mother rabbit pieces, I don't see anything wrong with presenting a loved
parent with a Valentine's Day gift. The bedside scene with mother rabbit is
really personally touching to me because I was a sickly child and my mom bending
over my bed and giving me soup or tea was an oft occurring scene for my first 10
years of life. For the mother rabbit and the rocking chair, I added a hanging
bunch of hearts to make it sort of more Valentinesy. For the bedside scene, I
added hearts to the bed covers and headboard and later coordinating dots
and stripes to the pillowcase bedskirt and wallpaper. For the Peter Rabbit piece,
I handed him a Valentine's heart, and for Benjamin bunny I handed him a bouquet of
heart-shaped blossoms. Many of the artists I love like Dulac, Leyendecker
Mucha, and several others, I was really only exposed to after college when I got
back into art and researched illustrators, but Beatrix Potter was one
of those illustrators I actually grew up seeing and have loved almost my whole
life, so doing studies of her enchanting and delicately drawn characters was a
real lovely thing for me. Nostalgic and bittersweet-- brings back so many
childhood memories of reading in bed or reading her stories out loud to my
younger brother. So I'll take a break from painting here. We'll return to
painting the two handsome bunny bucks in a bit, but I want to show how to turn
these paintings into lovely glossy ornaments. And I did the painting at a
predetermined size and shape to fit on the wood blank. And the painting is already
cut out, and once it's done being painted I can glue it onto the wood blank using
PVA glue or matte medium from Ranger or Liquitex. Any strong ph-neutral, acid-free
glue will work. The painting rarely fits perfectly on the wood blank so the edges
have to be sanded off for a more professional look. Only sand your piece
once the glue from gluing the painting onto the wood blank is totally dry. It
did take forever to sand off the paper on the little scalloped wood hearts, so I'm
never doing that again. In fact, I'm looking into trying a new
product-- a watercolor ground from Schmincke for difficult shaped
ornaments and jewelry in the future. I also glued and sanded a decorative thin
Lotka paper to the backside of the wood blanks. You can do another painting to
glue on the back if you want, and then flip to new ornaments on different
days, but I went with just a decorative hand block printed paper on the back.
Once I was done gluing and sanding both sides, I thoroughly brushed off any paper
dust. You don't want that left there, otherwise it'll be sealed in for
posterity and annoy the heck out of anybody! And I just brushed on a Liquitex
gloss varnish on the backside of it with the decorative paper to seal that and
then I let that dry. For the front side I covered it with Ranger's Glossy Accents
which is an acid-free, dimensional, clear glue finish that will seal the painting
under a faux resin finish. I do the outline first for a piece that is not
sitting in a recessed bezel and then I fill in the center with glue. Since I
have painful hands from JHS hypermobility injuries, I asked Elijah to
help squeeze the Glossy Accents out. In the past, I've also cut the tip wider or pulled
the tip out, so it pours easy without squeezing. I popped any bubbles I saw
with a pin. I'm okay if a few bubbles show up later as long as focal areas
like faces and hands and such are bubble-free. The glue goes down cloudy
but it will dry clear and glossy like resin. Unlike resin, Glossy Accents is
water-resistant not waterproof, but it's also non-toxic and non fumey, and much
more eco-friendly than conventional resin. I put my jewelry and ornament parts
with glossy accents on them in a tin with the lid ajar to dry. This lets them
get some airflow but the mostly closed lid keeps lint and dust or hair from
flying about and settling in the wet glue. These wood blanks have no drilled
holes so I'm just gonna be gluing ribbon hanging loops to them later and also
painting the profiles with an acrylic paint which you'll see in the final
pieces. So while those first two pieces have the glossy accents drying in them
overnight, I can get back to painting. So here's Peter Rabbit and I really like
how it looks like he's sort of really shyly holding this Valentine's heart.
Even though the original picture was that he was nervous about being in Mr.
McGregor's garden, it really works as a shy valentine's piece. I've left the
palette on screen this time since it was teeny enough to fit so nicely. I started
out with wet into wet fur and then I did portions of his face wet on dry. I
did the heart wet on dry as well and then I did the jacket wet into wet
again. I forgot to paint the top part of his chest brown, and then I
the ill-conceived idea that I would look cute as a green shirt front, but even
after adding buttons to it, it didn't get any better, and just looked ludicrously
short. So I scrubbed out as much of that silly green shirt front as I could,
luckily it was only in a small area and still damp. When I went over it with
brown to imply fur as I should have from the very start, it retained a greenish hue
that didn't match with the remainder of Peter's fur, so for a moment I felt as
nervous as Peter looks here, but then I recovered and just added a bit of green
to his fur everywhere else, and that solved the color mismatching problem. And
it looks fine with a little bit of a greenish shadow cast to it because it's
mixed from the same three colors. I did the background with a bit of two metallic
greens: the brighter green on the top half and the duller, olive metallic one
on the bottom. I stopped at just a sheer glaze because I'm only swatch demoing
this metallic set, but you can layer and deepen the metallic colors for your own
pieces if you want. And moving on to handsome Benjamin bunny, and he's much
the same process and colors except he has a smart green waistcoat to Peter's
cornflower blue one, and I gave him a bouquet of heart-shaped blossoms instead
of a heart-shaped Valentine in his hands and Peter's clogs were green whereas
Benjamin's little clogs are burgundy shoes. For this ornament background,
I swatched using the other metallic set. I used a tealish color for the sky, and
for the little bit of ground that Benjamin is sitting on, I used the same teal and
then I covered it with an earthy peach color, but then it looks just really too
muddy which I learned happens with metallics when mixing a few colors. Luckily,
the metallic mica sits on the surface much more than other paint which sinks
in so I was able to lift most of the mica metallic paint off even on this non
externally sized paper with a damp q-tip. Then I just poked in the earthy peachy
color on its own and then it looked fine as the ground. The quality of both
metallic sets from the few colors i swatched from each of them seemed pretty
much the same and these sets are unused except for the small amount I tested
them for this video and they're available as giveaway presents. The
larger black set of metallic watercolor pans is from Yasumoto
and the smaller white set of pearlescent watercolor pans is from Zig. They can go
down in a glaze or they can be used thicker for a more dense application. I'm
also including six new watercolor brushes in this current giveaway. One
silver brush black velvet number four liner brush, one silver brush
at Number ten round, one Princeton synthetic number four-pointed filbert,
one Princeton synthetic twenty over zero spotter, and two mini sable round travel
watercolor brushes! To enter this giveaway, just comment and describe
below or share with me via email, patreon, or Instagram your Valentine's Day or
anti-Valentine's Day art that you've created or would like to create. I'm
going to pick eight winners an email, or private message them to ask for their
mailing addresses. Patrons get first priority but this giveaway is also open
to all my YouTube subscribers. Even if you've participated in my past giveaways,
feel free to participate again. I'm paying for the giveaway gifts and
shipping so if the gift is lost in the mail then I'm sorry, but it's not gonna
be replaced. But all my past giveaways have reached their destination
safely so I think it should work out. Well, wizards, my Potter Bunny
ornaments turned out really delicate and glossy! And the glued on pink ribbon
loops and acrylic painted profiles and coordinating colors really added some
nice final polishing touches. I hope you enjoyed this holiday project and that
you participate in the giveaway while it's still open!
Thanks for parking brushes here, please like, subscribe, and check out my website
links and patreon page to support my art and art channel below. As always, wishing
you fantastical art adventures!