Pinterest Challenge – Watercoloring

During the winter, we spend a lot of time inside.  More specifically, I have spent a lot of time in the living room.  It’s the room we live in.  hence the clever name.

And it’s also the place that we have a giant blank canvas.  I could not for the life of me decide what to do with it.  Do I recreate something with loads of texture?  Do I wait to paint it until I finally get some kind of console table below it to decide if it’s gonna stay there?  Do I go ahead and remove it all together and just put a big collections of different frames there?

After wasting hours thinking about the options, I decided to just go for it.  I mean, nothings ever gone wrong when you decide to jump in with both feet….stock market excluded.

After seeing this great video on how to use watercolor pencils from my girl Kristen and with loads of inspiration from one of my favorite artists (I pinned her version of a watercolor jellyfish but I love all her art)…I decided to create my own version of a giant jellyfish for my huge canvas.

First I sketched out the rough outline with my black watercolor pencil…

Then came time for coloring.  It’s nothing fancy – a fourth grader can do it.

It was tedious but it took longer because I kept having to get up and back up ten feet to see the entire piece…just to make sure it was balanced and not doing something vulgar with a tentacle.

After I was done with the dry drawing part, here’s what it looked like…

Then I used a small paintbrush and a little cup of water (it turned black after a few minutes) to start brushing the lines I made.  See how the upper part is so much more bold and the lower tentacles are still muted and light?  All because of water.

And when I was finally finished, here it is in all it’s glory for you to sea

Nothing is perfect about it but that’s okay to me…since it is just original mom-art.

I love how the water blends the colors together and gives it such contrast.  It looks so messy and juvenile really close up but a few steps away it looks much more difficult and still fun and colorful.  It’s like a Monet (name that movie).

So that was my little PC Project – I dare ya to check out the other fine ladies cohosting….here’s the links just in case you aren’t awesome enough to have them in your reader already (kidding kidding….you are all awesome…unless you aren’t) -

• Sherry of Young House Love
• Cassie from Hi Sugarplum
• Erin from The Great Indoors

Did you guys play along?  I’d love to see your projects (each host has the option to throw a linky party and I’d love if you linked up below so that I can see what you did and enjoy an afternoon of project surfing!)

Here are the instructions if you are a linky-party newbie…

• click on the blue “Add Your Link” button at the bottom of this post – it has a blue frog head on it
• add a link to your PC project blog post in the url field (please do not link to your home page)
• for “name” write a short descriptive name for your project (e.g. “Antiqued Window”)
• pretty pretty please with baconsauce on top to remember to link in the body of your post to the Pinterest item and the original source of the photo on Pinterest as well as back to me and this editions hosts above – it’s just a big ole fashioned linky love fest!  Oh and if nobody told you today…you look stunning today!

If you’d rather just link over to your project in the comment section, feel free to do that – or even add a link to a free photo sharing site like Flickr with your pics if you don’t have a blog (remember to set the gallery to public so we can all see it).   Now let’s get to the party!