Watercolor Snowflake Step by Step

I can’t believe I’ve been been in my second watercolor class for over 2 months and I haven’t posted any of my projects!  To be honest, my professor this semester isn’t my favorite.  She’s the not the same one I had over the summer, unfortunately, and is less focused on teaching us and more focused and letting our spirits reign wild and free.  Or some nonsense like that.

Anyway, here’s my first project of the semester.  We were practicing all of the watercolor ‘gimmicks’- things you use to manipulate your paint.  You can put salt on your wet paint to make a certain texture, let it dry with crinkled up plastic wrap on it, etc.  For my snowflake I focused on learning how to use tape and masking fluid to keep my whites, used salts and splattering techniques and did a double layer of plastic wrap (I love the double layered look so much more than single layer!)  Here’s how it went down step by step-

First I drew out my snowflake on an 18×22″ sheet of paper.  I used masking fluid to mask of parts of the snowflake I wanted to keep the white of the paper.  (I love the Daniel Smith Watercolor Masking Fluid because the bottle has a nice tip that allows you to do some pretty detailed work)

When the fluid dried, I wet the entire sheet with water (no paint yet) and then dropped in paint with a large brush, allowing colors to mix freely.  I covered the whole page with crinkled plastic wrap and let it dry completely before removing.

When the paint dried, I removed the plastic wrap and added more details onto my snowflake with my masking fluid.  These spots will be lightly colored, but not as dark as the final background.

When the masking fluid dried (again!  I know, there’s a lot of drying going on in this painting- you’ll definitely need something else to work on during the drying times!)  I repeated the process, wetting my entire canvas, dropping in colors and covering in plastic wrap.  Doing two layers of the plastic wrap brings really fun color blends into your piece- you’ve got to try it!

Here’s what it looked like when the second plastic wrap layer was dry!  I masked off the rest of the snowflake and added some darker values to enhance the details.  I had some fun with them, splattering dark, super saturated colors in some parts and sprinkling salts on others.

 Then I let the whole thing dry overnight to make sure everything was set and I took off the masking fluid to see how things had progressed!  This was definitely the most exciting part-

Here’s what I ended up with!  The whole experience was a lot of fun and very freeing- I haven’t ever done anything this loose before.  I feel like I learned a lot of what water colors can do and am excited to apply it all to my next paintings.