December Doodle Wreath of Circles

December Doodle

My CLmooc friends doodle every day. 

And Este Macleod class today — hers is watercolor media, mine is digital watercolor.  It’s a wreath of circles with hidden words in the center.

Since mine is digital, I found hex values for the colors she chose, although I changed some because they just did not seem to really match the colors of her palette. I’m still adjusting those even now as I want to create one in blues and greens.

Next I searched my millions of brushes until I found one that acted like watercolor– blending the colors as I layer the paint with my brush. The brush I used for painting to blend colors — as in blue over yellow to blend into green — is the “Bloom and Bleed” brush from the “Messy Extras” in Every-Tuesday Teela Cunningham’s Messy Watercolor brush set, for which she has a complete class for building beautiful messy watercolor style paintings. The brushes come with the class– a I was able to paint this lovely meadowlark with them, which I share here: May Doodle Watercolor Meadowlark, which might inspire you to join the class!

Anyway, so now I have brush that blends and colors for the palette. But one of the things that Este does is use daily objects as paint brushes– so the circles in the artwork are paint stamped with the inside tubes of paper towels. Our family calls them “durdders,” for, you know, when you need a trumpet so you hold a tube up to your mouth and sing through it, “Dur dur der der da der!” Hence durdders or derders.

That, of course, would not work in the digital world. So I watched the effect of the stamping in the lesson with the tube and designed a brush that mimics the effect:

Here’s in my Google Drive is the shared Procreate brush I made, in case you’ve a need for a derder stamp!

Another set of watercolor that helped me is from Calvin of Drifter Studio— his water blender brush helps to “flow” the watercolor. His fine liner pen will helpe with the details [ I used Teela’s blend and bleed mostly for this project]. Calvin’s set of Impossible Watercolor. Note: it’s the same as the Aquarelle Set he had before; it does have a bonus set with it.

So– I have the palette, the brushes that act like watercolor as far as blending colors is concerned, and the derder– so I dove in and followed Este as she demonstrated her color choices, process, and suggestions.

I’m thankful for Teela and Calvin for creating and offering commercial license in their brushes for the ipad and Procreate. You never know when that one piece will be the one to share on your POD [Print On Demand] site, and you’ll want to have used brushes for that purpose.

And, a thank you to Este for her careful, thoughtful, and creative joy in teaching fun and festive holiday art. You may want to join in the 5 day class, which is available for December– check it out: Creative Circle

For links to mentioned artists, see Artists Resources page.