Mother’s Day Watercolor Collage

One of the upsides to being an expat–double the holidays to commemorate with crafts! This postcard actually was meant to be something entirely different. I meant to watercolor a floral wreath with the message inside the hoop. But, in typical me fashion, I jumped straight in without any sketches and messed up the cursive with the brush. And this was on my nice, too nice to ever use, Fabriano 300g hot press paper.

Luckily, I remembered I had been wanting to try a watercolor collage of a flower jungle where instead of cutting the individual flower pieces on painted paper, I would paint them whole first, then cut them out for layering.

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I’m pleased with the end result considering there was virtually no planning involved. Some takeaways from this project:

• Next time I’d like to try fine lining the pieces in black and add it to a white background
• Actually PLAN the collage beforehand a bit, so I know what kind of flowers to draw, which colors to use, and how to place them
• 300g paper is way too nice and too thick for collages — never again!
• I really need to learn watercolor (and painting) properly. I have all these ideas for what I want to make, but my actual skills can’t realize my creative brain’s visions. Hehe. More practice it is!

I filmed most of the process on my phone and made this behind the scenes video to practice editing. It’s so straight forward I can hardly call it a tutorial. Sooo much to learn about editing… like how to add music. On my YouTube app there was an option to add music at the last step, but didn’t see that on the PC version. Anyway, Happy Mother’s Day! Moms, you are the best ❤