15-minute Watercolor Wreath



Naptime is when I can pull out my super cheap watercolor paints and (pretend to) get crafty, but since there's a finite amount of time I have to be quick about it! I managed to whip this up in 15 minutes, which means it would be easy to re-do this and get even better at it.

I tried to go with greens and neutrals for this project, which is how I ended up painting this watercolor wreath what can only be described as "accidentally diarrhea-green."

Adapted from this tutorial, here's what I did.

What you need:
--watercolors (from the dollar store, or fahncy shmancy craft store paints)
--paper (I didn't bother using watercolor paper #yolo)
--a bowl or something round to trace
--pencil
--scrap paper



What you do:
1. Practice your wreath elements on the scrap paper. As you can see in the picture above, my "practice" strip of paper has some pretty bright ferns, which of course I didn't replicate on the actual wreath. That's the point of practicing.

2. VERY LIGHTLY trace your bowl on your paper. Make sure it's small enough you can paint outside of the circle. If you trace it too darkly (dark? darkly?), it will be really difficult to erase after painting.

3. Paint a few large elements in symmetry around the circle. This helps divide up the wreath so you can fill in between the large elements.

4. Go on and get down with your bad self. I went a little wild filling stuff in, and most of the greenery came out thicker than I had hoped, even though I was using a thin brush. Oh well!

5. After it dries, erase the pencilled circle gently. Touch up and any places the eraser took off paint.




I have been thinking about how we're going to re-do the gallery wall we have in the living room (pictured here), which has lots of teal and is off-center to the furniture below it (a trash-picked organ. I swear we aren't hoarders.) I can't wait to use this watercolor in the freshly updated gallery wall...Stay tuned for how the whole update comes together!

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