Spoon & Toothpick Poppies - Viking Visual Art and Crafts

I've decided to get (a little bit) back into painting. This is mostly as a homeschool project than anything else, but a little bit of fun and relaxation as well.

Here is the final result of yesterday's spoon and toothpick poppies...

This is scanned in and edited on Gimp... But here's where it started:

Jay Lee Painting on YouTube. I love watching his videos - they're so calming and relaxing, partly due to the music he uses. He doesn't speak, but he doesn't have to.

So, I sat down - with my daughters - and tried (my best) to emulate this method of painting... with some degree of success.

My first attempt was good for helping me get to grips with using a spoon as a paint brush.

The other thing I learned in this first attempt (besides the fact that I'd started my painting way too high up on the paper) was that until you have really good control of the spoon edges, it was better to use a toothpick for the stems of the poppies. So, I ended up using two tools rather than Jay Lee's one (not incluing the dots - for which, he used a cotton swab and I used a paint brush handle. Note: I added the dots at the very end of the painting on the second attempt.

Here's my second attempt:

After it dried, I scanned it in and took it to Gimp, where I cleaned up some of the messy lines. I didn't change any strokes at all, just cleaned up edges with the eraser tool.

Finally, I played with a couple of fun tools to make some digital paper to sell on my Etsy stores. (Yes, I will have two - one for my more esoteric items, one for everything else - and I'll probably do a third for my stories and sell those as downloads and sell the cover prints separately - but that's for another post on another day.)

Here are some of the papers I came up with:

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All work done by myself using acrylic paints, then GIMP and even a touch of Photoscape. Crossposted on Hive.

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Previous Art and Crafts Posts

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Lori Svensen
author/designer at A'mara Books
photographer/graphic artist for Viking Visual
(Buy my work at RedBubble, TeePublic, PicFair and DeviantArt.)
verified author on Goodreads
(Buy my books at Books2Read and at LBRY)

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