Category: Outdoor

Wildflower Painting

7/5/2019

Who doesn't love wildflowers?! This is a fun, whimsical painting to do with friends during the spring or summer months, they'll love it!

Supplies:

Canvas/canvas board
Easel if desired
Acrylic paints (yellow, gold, green, black, white, blue, brown, fuchsia.. all the colors, just get all the colors!)
Sponges
Q-tips
Water cup
Paper towels
Paint brushes of various shapes (at least one pointy and one tiny one!)

1. Using a sponge, dab yellow and gold onto the canvas forming a marbled background. If preferred, let some of the white show. Accentuate gold at the edges for an authentic look.

3. Using a pointed brush, add grass stems randomly throughout the sponged background using various shades of green.

5. If desired, add tiny/light dabs of green into the white so that it looks more realistic as if some of the stems/grass were showing through.

7. Add some highlights to the blue by going over the petals and center lightly with white.

9. Next, create a variety of white daisy shapes throughout the foreground. Remember not all daisies are made the same! This may take a couple of coats to get a solid white layer.

11. For the last set of wildflowers, create “Red Clover” with fuchsia. Dab the paint into a rounded cluster with Q-tips. This may take a second coat to make it a nice solid layer.

13. Make the grass more realistic by using a pointy brush and sporadically adding “wisps” of grass over some of the flowers, seen below.

2. Rinse out sponge or use a new one for the grass background. Use 3 colors for grass: black, green, lighter green. Start with black, dabbing at the bottom for the deepest, shadowy parts. For each color you add, very lightly dab at the top to “fade”. Add green above the black, blending into the black as well. And lastly add the lighter green, blending into the previous colors.

4. Using a clean brush, paint a handful of “Queen Anne’s Lace” by dabbing white in elongated “UFO” shapes. Make sure to add a “bud butt” of green underneath some of them as if you were seeing the stem of the flower.

6. Next, create various shapes and sizes to represent blue “Flax” flowers with a lighter blue paint. Be sure to make them different from one another. Keep in mind, ones in the foreground will usually be larger than the background.

8. If desired, go back over the white with a little bit of blue with a skinny brush so that the white isn’t so stark. This also gives the flowers some more dimension.

10. I don’t particularly like how I did my daisies so feel free to do them however you wish!I added an orange center, rounding the top to make some look more realistic. I lightly brushed brown throughout giving the petals and added a tiny dusting of black in some areas as well. Again, as with the “Queen Anne’s Lace” add a “bud butt” to some of the daisies as if you could see underneath it.

12. Next, add a bit of black and white very lightly to the flower for some dimension. You could also use the green from the grass before, anything to give it a dark depth in between the fuchsia. Can be done with the Q-tip as well.

14. After adding some more grass in, it’s time for the really messy part!

If you don’t want bits of paint on you or possibly your clothes, you should probably avoid this step or work extremely slow and careful!

Using white paint, mix in a few drops of water to make the paint more fluid. Dab your brush into this new mixture and hold it over the painting. LIGHTLY hit/flick the paintbrush with your opposite hand, moving throughout the painting until satisfied. All done!

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Strawberry Rocks

6/16/2019

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Supplies:

"strawberry-shaped" rocks
acrylic paint (exterior if they will be outdoors)
- red, white, various greens, black
paint brushes (one tiny/pointy one!)
basket/bowl for rocks
fabric if desired for the container

When I saw posts on Pinterest regarding these rocks I thought they were adorable and felt like I had to do them for a program at work, which here I am, prepping to do just that! My goal was to travel around to local parks and search for the perfect "strawberry-shaped" rocks to use, however, doing them for a public program meant that I needed about 110 of these rare diamonds and lets be real... that did not happen. I love using up supplies from previous projects and a coworker of mine had left over "mexican river rocks" from a rock-painting program, so, this is what I ended up using, cool.

Taking a quick look at project photos on Pinterest, I saw that some showed that the rocks were painted white first.

"Nah, I don't need to do that" I thought to myself peering at the 110 rocks waiting on my cart. So I went ahead and painted the first couple with red... "huh... this doesn't look too good" I quickly realized. "Do I seriously have to paint these white?" I begrudgingly thought to myself.

So, I took a shot at the next one with a nice single coat of white acrylic paint. After it dried, I put the first coat of red over it and WOW, what a difference! You can see in the below photo the ones I painted first laying in the background on newspaper vs. the new beautifully vibrant rock in my hand.

Thankfully, we have people who work with us who are often looking for "odd" jobs to do in down time.... well.... I think painting 110 rocks white is the perfect job to do for that! Thank you, thank you, thank you!

I thought 5 rocks would be a good amount for this project which ended up working well for dry times as you make your way through each rock and each layer of paint.

So, paint all rocks white, then paint all rocks red. I put 2 coats of red on top so it's a nice even layer.

After the red has dried, you are ready to start your leaves. I was very unsure of how to do this. Do I make them realistic? Do I make them whimsical? Do I blend? all ran through my mind. I decided to go for a more "cartoonish" look, I guess. And started with a base solid layer of dark green.

When I got done with all 5, I started laughing because they totally looked like tomatoes! I set them up on the post-it notes so they could dry without touching anything. Here is also where I found out how slippery these things became with the paint! So be careful and hold on to 'em.

After my dark green dried, I went over it in a smaller reflection with light green. Then, I added a dot of the dark green in the center to represent where the stem would technically be. I'm not gonna lie... I hated this... still hate it. I do not like the way this came out but got even more stressed out the more I tried to "fix" it. I found it best to just leave it as is and move on full steam ahead!

Next, will be your act of patience. Using a tiny pointy brush, paint "raindrop" shaped black "dots" all over your rocks to represent the strawberry seeds. And do this with every... single... rock!

Now, go over every... single... dot.... on every... single... rock... with a tiny white "raindrop"/"dot". You could also change this up and be more realistic by making the seeds a golden yellow or changing the look of some so they're not all exactly the same. But I didn't have time for that and was shooting for a simple, easy project for my participants!

Lastly, put them in a cute bowl, basket, container, whatever! I found farmer market style containers at our local craft store. They came in a pack of six so were super affordable! I also put a piece of fabric in to drape over the sides before I put the rocks in and wa-la, Adorable summer decor!

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Tic-Tac-Toe

4/4/2019

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It's been a whole month since I have posted a project. Time is flying by... sometimes it feels too incredibly fast! I have been doing a lot of projects for other people so I don't have much to post, but, my next up-coming project at the library is a DIY Tic-Tac-Toe board. I thought this idea would be perfect since spring is (supposedly) here. I don't have specific steps for this, as you can make it whatever you want! But here is the list of supplies I used and my end product!

Supplies:

Wood slice (can be bought at your local craft store but I had my uncle cut me some slices from his wood pile instead! - if you do this, make sure you dry them out first!)
Patio/outdoor paint (Amazon has a great set!)
Paintbrushes of various types
Playing pieces (flat rocks are great - heavy so they won't blow away and they're free!)
Glitter if glitter is preferred... which to me it always is!

I got the original idea on Pinterest on the AttaGirlSays blog! I am encouraging my class to paint whatever they would like for their tic-tac-toe board and have a collage of photos to provide them some ideas.

I went with a galaxy/space theme for mine, but, I would love to do like a big daisy for the base/board and then lady bugs and bumblebees for the pieces! Maybe next time!

Have fun and happy spring!

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Wildflower Painting

Strawberry Rocks

Tic-Tac-Toe

Rebecca Myers

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