Spring Bird Garland

I love watercolor garlands and wanted to share one I made recently to celebrate Spring!  This is a great way to use up all those watercolor paintings for those of you who paint in the Waldorf manner.  If you're not familiar with wet on wet technique, it's such an easy and beautiful process and children love this method!  So, first get some watercolor paper.  You can buy special tape to tape it down to a board.  That keeps it from crinkling up.  I don't have any tape at the moment so I'll share a trick. Do your painting, then when it's dry take a water bottle and spritz the back.  Then put it under something heavy, I used my cutting board.  Let it dry and it will be perfectly flat.

So back to the painting: take a piece of watercolor paper, spritz the top with water or use a large flat brush to wet the paper.  Then take tube watercolor and after adding water to dilute a bit, drop the paint or apply the paint with a brush to the paper.  The less diluted the color the brighter your colors will be. See the above picture. I like to reuse individual sized apple sauce containers for this purpose. Experiment with different colors.  For this poject we used green & blue, and another painting with blue & yellow.

Another trick.  If you get too much paint on it which kids often do.  You can either:
A. let it dry, it usually looks beautiful in the end.  Or
B. take a completely dry brush and touch it to the puddle of paint  The dry brush (if it's a quality brush that is) sucks up the paint, leaving it less saturated. 

After your painting is dry make a template by drawing a shape and cutting it out.  I free handed this one. Then use it to trace the others.  I thought this simple bird shape would be fun for Spring.

After they're all cut out string them together with needle and thread. 

I put ours up against this beam because otherwise they like to flip around.  Against a wall or fireplace or something would be lovely.   I love how fresh and joyful they look.  They really brighten up the room! 

Happy Spring!