Hey, Watercolor Wizards, Hajra here! Today we'll be making some decorative mini
ribbon and bow paintings on ATCs and comparing Cretacolor aqua sticks,
aqua bricks, and Schmincke watercolor during the project. As usual, art blogs,
sketches, deconstructed painting posts, Q&As, and art gift rewards are available for
my patrons on Patreon and before I get to the ATCs I'm gonna take a few minutes
to go back to the master study I did in my last video and add in a shadow on the
pencil from the baby's arm and hand and also polish up his knee a bit. I'm in a
rush to get these pieces done for YouTube videos but stepping away and
coming back lets me see places I want to fix. Okay, done for now! And like the
saying goes, "Art is never finished, just abandoned." That baby was in cretacolor
aqua sticks used as gouache, actually, so I'll be doing more of the
ribbon bow ATCs in aqua bricks for this video. Again, both cretacolor aqua
bricks and aqua sticks are lightfast, artists quality, and they make a lovely,
dense, creamy gouache. I use them becauseI dislike opening and storing paint tubes.
I've always been a fan of pan colors and the cretacolors are the
only lightfast pan gouache option that I found. so this first
ATC is a simple black ribbon and a triple bow and it's one of those little
easy things that isn't much to look at but once I put in the last embellishment,
stitches and studs with a white pen, it really pops and morphs into a cute piece.
perfect as a little Valentine's Day card, actually--even though I initially
thought to do these cards in time for Christmas, the bows and ribbons will work
for lots of vacations and holidays. Pretty Universal. I use the Aqua bricks
and a thinner glaze application in lighter areas and then went to mid
density for darker areas. I can come back and make it even denser and more opaque,
but you can see it already has a more opaque matte look of a gouache versus a
true, luminous, transparent watercolor and this ATC I can just use on its own
or I can mount it in a Strathmore ATC Mount & frame card and it gives a
really nice frame to the piece and it also makes the whole artwork look larger
because the border of the mounting frame adds to the size of it. I'll show all
five of the ribbon cards I did on their own and also mounted in the frame cards.
Thee frame mount cards come with little envelopes, too, but
I didn't show the envelopes here. The next bow is tied from a very glossy
ribbon and I decided to do it in Schmincke watercolor--I chose an opaque
watercolor pan color so it's the closest to the opaque cretacolors I'm using as
gouache. A cadmium red from the Schmincke dot card--yeah, I'm gonna use those dots
till they're all gone, but for future paintings I do have this color in an
official full-size pan, too. To keep everything in a similar technique I can
use the color thin to mid density, it can be used thicker if you want and also
white gouache can be used instead of the white of the paper for the highlights.
And this will make the whole piece more opaque. That Wizard baby that I just had
out earlier is the perfect example of using a paint opaque all over and also
using white for tints and not the paper. It's what gives that solid body color
look to the subject. Now, with all of these bows they could have been further
polished but they're just humble little ATC's; everything doesn't have to be a
masterpiece. I've said time and again, do some projects for fun and for practice,
to relax and to learn casually about your art materials. If you want to learn
about my sketch and layout and brainstorm process for more complex
pieces, or get sketches for various youtube video projects, all that good
stuff is on my Patreon! So this bow had a satiny sheen to it--I've sketched in
highlight areas with my pencil but it's totally up to you if that's gonna make
it more or less confusing. I always end up feeling like in the end that less
pencil is better; sometimes the pencil being there just makes it confusing.
I got a reference for all five of the ATC bows I did from Julie Lynn's YouTube
channel. She's one of my subscribers and I checked out her new channel, I put
the link in the description box below, and I saw that she did these ASMR videos
with really pretty things on-screen: decoration pieces, perfume bottles,
illustrated books, and gifts she was wrapping. And the bows and ribbons she
was making as she was wrapping gifts in her videos were so pretty that I just
wanted to paint them as teeny little trading card size artworks! So go and
check out Julie's new channel if you like pretty stuff. I asked her permission
to use these bows and I think she said okay since she is really really super
sweet. Just make sure if you use any art photo or video reference from somebody
else that you ask him or her for permission. Anyway, I guess this is sort
of like an informal collaboration with Julie and I want to thank her again for
providing me with such beautiful bows in those videos that I was inspired to
do these five little cards. I did the background of this red bow in perylene
green also from the Schmincke dot card, and it's a great complementary shadow color
to the red. I can see why it has become a very popular shadow color for landscape
painters: it has almost granulating quality and a really
luscious low-intensity. The Schmincke colors, of course, handled differently
from the cretacolors. Schmincke watercolors are much more finely ground
and also dispersed more readily because of the ox gall in them--both traits are
to be expected when comparing them to an opaque, creamy type paint like the
cretacolors. With this next card, I use the creta color aqua bricks again.
Red for the bow, greens for the background, and some grays. The bells
were the funnest part to block in with the grays, so I put in a mid gray on
them first and then a dark blackish gra,y and a white highlight color. If you
want to polish the bells more than I did, just work on clarifying the highlights
and neatening up the edges more than I did. For this ATC I went back at least twice
and darkened up the red in the bow to make it more opaque in places and also
later the background to a darker green for more contrast. The little lines of
metallic sheen on the ribbon were another really fun part, and I did those
little metallic lines the same way as I did the bells: with a mid-tone gray, then
a blackish gray, and white--this time from a pen--foe little highlights. The effect is
like glitter, though I've used no glitter or metallic paint here, so it's a nice
little trick to learn. The last bow I filmed was a quick one: I laid down an
initial wash of Schmincke alizarin crimson and then once that was dry, I did
lines of black then off-white using aqua bricks again to make a plaid pattern.
It looked so cute with just the plaid that I didn't come back with further shadows
and highlights or a background. And the nice thing about gouache is that because
it's opaque I can come back in over the top with a white line instead of saving
that white line like I would if I had just been doing this in transparent
watercolor. And I did one last bow actually but it was off-screen: I took
some time around an hour and a half to ink in what I saw as the pattern on the
bow with a waterproof Zig marker. It was a brown marker so it gave me a nice
baseline for the entire bow and then I came back over with a wash of yellow and
some orange and white here and there, this time with the aqua sticks to add
colors other than the brown to this bow. I did the background first in orange
aqua stick and then went over it with a blue aqua stick and they mixed to make
that Brown that looks more reddish or more blue in various places, so it's a
really nice background. When comparing the handling of the Aqua bricks to the
aqua sticks I used for the last bow and the Leyendecker baby study I did,
it's the same as I've noted in other videos: both aqua sticks and aqua bricks
are very similar to each other in achieving opacity and in their handling.
However, the sticks are a little oily and waxy while the briques handle more like
conventional gouache, but it's not really much of a difference. I guess if I had to
choose one I'd actually choose the aqua sticks due to their greater color range
as both products are opaque like gouache and light fast and they work nearly the
same. Well, Wizards, I hope you enjoyed making these cute little ribbon bow ATC
paintings with me! As always, thanks for parking your brushes here, please like,
subscribe, and check out my website links and Patreon page to support my art
channel. Until next time, wishing you all miniature painting adventures!