Watercolor Weekend Wreath

I have been painting a lot of scenes lately with my watercolor stamps, and decided to try something a little different this week - a wreath.  I was inspired by the botanical style of graphic artwork that I've seen on Pinterest from a lot of stationery companies, and wanted to see if I could achieve a similar look with my stamps.  I'm pretty happy with my first effort:

I started by tracing a faint circle in pencil on my Canson XL watercolor paper to use as a guide.  I began with the leafy green image from 5126 WC Foliage Set 4, and #249 Hunter Green, stamping it around the circle in both first and second generation.  I wanted to have a strong contrast of greens, so I coloured the stem of a flower from 5008 WC Flower Set 3 in #126 Light Olive, and the petals in #565 Deep Blue.  To fill in a few areas, I used the tiny foxglove (quite possibly my favourite Ai watercolor flower!) from 4052 Flower Set coloured in #533 Peacock Blue.  I love the versatility of this stamp, I can stamp it repeatedly to be as long as I like, and because it's so tiny, it allows me to bend the blossom one way or another to suit my design.

Using two of the branches from 4964 WC Branches Set coloured in #969 Chocolate, I tucked branches in and around the wreath to finish it off.  I very lightly used my damp #1 paintbrush to dab the leaves and blossoms, keeping them mostly intact (I didn't want to lose the image definition).  I used a TT42 - Twintone marker in 42 Navy to add a few dots around the foxgloves to finish them off.  I looked at several of the birds from different sets, and found that this one from 5030 On The Sparrow Set in the Ai Bible Journaling collection fit perfectly inside the wreath - so I coloured him with #969 and used my stamp positioner to set him just inside the bottom of the wreath.  I pulled out the colour with my brush, and added in touches of #533 on his wings and tail.

I kept my wreath quite loose and open, making it slightly irregular - and really love the look! I can hardly wait to try a fall version.  I matted the image on some periwinkle cardstock and stitched it down with my sewing machine.  I tied some twine around my kraft cardstock base and attached the image with some pop dots.