Leftover Paint Collage Flower Tutorial

Some may call me "thrifty." I just call it what it is... I'm cheap. Money, or lack thereof, has been an issue most of my 40+ years. As a result, I hate wasting things. The crafty side of me is always coming up with ways to re-use items. Right now, I have a bag of ripped t-shirts in my closet with the assumption that someday I'll have time to sew them into cute stuffed animals or patchwork skirts. 

Anyhow, when I paint, I tend to put a bit too much paint on my palette. What to do with that leftover paint? 

Well a few years ago, I started just scraping it onto sheets of drawing paper with an old plastic gift card and storing it in a drawer. A few weeks ago I stumbled on to some amazing collage artists on Instagram who created their own papers for their collages. Bingo! There's what my drawer of leftover painted pages will become.

So after I painted this page in my Bible (see blog post HERE for details), I decided to be intentional with my leftover paint.

acrylic craft paint layered over watercolor

I have a pad of 9x12 white drawing paper and with my old, trusty brushes, I used all of the excess paint to paint a large square or rectangle. Note: this is just cheap acrylic craft paint. 

my tiny craft desk

And then I simply let them dry overnight. 

I really loved how that Bible Journaling page turned out so I made a reference page and taped it above my desk. It has my go-to flower doodles with a favorite color palette (with Martha Stewart craft paints) on it. 

reference page

So the next weekend when I had some time and was trying to find a creative outlet for some anxiety and grief, I got out the painted pages and with the reference page taped to the wall as inspiration, I just started cutting out shapes to make flowers similar to the ones I draw all of the time. 

Only this time, I didn't draw or pre-plan anything first. I just started cutting. Like in elementary school, I just needed to be a kid and play and cut and glue things for a little bit.

a sunflower and lots of leaves in several sizes

And cut and move around and re-cut and glue I did! It was so fun to just play for a few minutes. 

My pad of drawing paper was on my desk and I had placed a sheet of watercolor paper (that I had dabbled blue watercolor on the day before) on it to serve as a sample background while I cut my flowers... and I really liked the little bits of flowers hanging off of the edge of the blue and onto the white paper. 

daisy petals lined up waiting to be glued on

After I had finished cutting and gluing together all 4 flowers, I decided to keep that background arrangement. 

And ta-dah! My finished piece...

leftover paint collage flowers

It was such a fun, playful, stress-relieving time, that when things were a little overwhelming last Sunday, I made myself sit down and make some more.

even more flowers!

waiting for stems and leaves

I didn't have enough green left so I simply pulled out the pad of drawing paper and squirted some Martha Stewart "granny smith" green on the paper and spread it out evenly with a paint brush.

now with stems and leaves

They have been sitting out on my desk all week and have curled up a bit. But that will be resolved with a few days of being pressed in a book and then mounted to thicker cardstock.

happy flowers

Another fun, relaxing time at my little craft desk. 

Keep blooming,

Ann :) 

Bible Journaling watercolor and acrylic paint flowers tutorial

Job 41:1

"Can you draw out Leviathan with a fishhook?"

This will be a fun and easy tutorial, I promise! But first a little backstory...

Over the last 8 weeks, our small family has been going through the valley. That's putting it mildly, but I know millions of people all over the world have it a million times worse that we do. 

8 weeks ago, we had to say goodbye to my favorite cat ever on the entire planet, Stomper. I'm still in shock. We had been doing all we could to treat him for fluid on his heart and kidney disease, but eventually his kidneys couldn't handle the medicine to keep the fluid off his heart and we had to help him walk Home. I'm still in shock. He was 17 and my baby boy and the best kitty ever. He was a maine coon that I adopted from a shelter when he was a kitten and we loved watching him grow up and his antics of behaving like a golden retriever dog. I am glad he is healed now, but I miss him dearly.

The day before he passed, we found out that another one of our cats, Abby, had Asthma and a heart murmur. Again we did everything we could for weeks, but tests revealed she had heart issues as well and her kidney levels were high. The vets couldn't pin point what was going on with her heart, but we got her on an inhaler and lasix. She spent a Friday at the vet for tests and observation and that Sunday night, she had a massive heart attack and died in front of me. 30 days after Stomper passed away! She was a snoeshoe (a reverse siamese cat like Grumpy Cat) that I fell in love with and adopted from a Humane Society nearly 10 years ago. I am glad she didn't have a long, drawn out, painful end, but it was a very traumatic event.

The kicker is that during this time, my daughter and I got sick and then my husband ended up in the hospital with pneumonia. A few weeks later we were better, but then my daughter got another cold and I got bronchitis. After a few weeks of that, we got sick for a third time! Fortunately that was somewhat mild and lasted only a few days. All of this despite vitamins, essential oils, home remedies, medications, and over-the-counter elixirs. 

Anyhow, the last 8 weeks have been pure survival mode. And leaning on God for strength and guidance.

I didn't do any Bible Journaling for probably a month and a half mainly because of the shock and just not feeling well enough to do anything. But a few weeks ago, I just opened up my Bible and tried to find a blank spread in Psalms, but there weren't many so I ended up in Job.

I got out my watercolors and just painted blobs of color down on the page. 

It felt good. To be honest, I wasn't reading or praying or reflecting or anything "spiritual" during that time. I just needed to do something creative to get unstuck. And blobs of watercolor helped a lot. 

While I painted, the passage my eyes kept falling on was Job 41:1 "Can you draw out Leviathan with a fishhook?" This is God asking Job this question and my understanding is that a Leviathan is a big, scary sea creature. 

But I just kept reading that question. And MY answer was, "no, I can't, but YOU can." All of this mess, this heartache, the sicknesses, the ridiculous pile of vet and hospital bills... all of it is still in God's control. Like the big, scary Leviathan.

So, on to the fun tutorial part...

(There is a supply list with Amazon affiliate links at the bottom of this post too!)

First, like I mentioned, I painted "blobs" of watercolor. To do this, I got out my trusty Prima Marketing watercolors in the Tropical palette. With a fat #5 round paintbrush, I dabbed plain water around the border of the page. Then I dipped the brush in color #23 "wild berry" and dabbed that on top of the water on the page. I made sure to leave some spots saturated with paint and others more watered down. I repeated this process with color #21 "sunset" in the center of the page. The page on the left was done with #20 "north isle" on the borders and #22 "lush" in the middle. 

Because the page was so wet and it was late, I left the page to dry for a day; however, I think it was 2 days before I got back to finishing it. 

Again, I didn't have a plan or image in my mind to create, so I got my thick Tombow pen out (a medium Faber Castell Pitt pen would work great too) and drew some of my standard flower shapes... a daisy, a sunflower, a coneflower, and a rose. 

Now the real fun part... acrylic paint. Because the background was too dark to continue with watercolors for the flowers, I thought it would be fun to layer watered-down acrylic paint over the blue background.

I selected my favorite Martha Stewart Crafts paint colors (the ones I have are the "multi-surface Satin acrylic craft paint"). Names listed below...

• white - wedding cake
• yellow - chamomile
• pink - poodle skirt and 
• blue - surf
• purple - periwinkle
• orange - wild salmon
• green - granny smith

I put a small blob of each color paint on my little palette and because I'm kinda lazy when it comes to cleaning my brushes, the brushes from 2 days prior were still sitting in a glass of water. Fortunately this worked out because the wet brushes watered down the acrylic paint a little. I took each color one at a time and painted all of the corresponding areas. White for daisy petals, orange for coneflower petals, yellow for sunflower petals, etc.

And I absolutely love how it turned out! I thought my pen lines were a little to drastic and the watered down acrylic paint (that was applied rather sloppily) "softened" up the look of the black lines. 

Maybe it was a combo of me needing time to just create without a plan and choosing my favorite colors and flowers, but this layering of acrylics on watercolor has turned out to be one of my favorite Bible Journaling pages yet.

I hope you enjoyed the process and are inspired to try something new and out of your comfort zone today. And if you are going through a valley season, remember God is in control of the Leviathans.

Below is a supply list with affiliate links to Amazon products. This means I receive a small percentage if you make a purchase using these links. I am a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for me to earn fees by linking to amazon.com and affiliated sites. 

• Bible - (I have the double-column version, but HERE is their single-column version)
• Watercolor paint - Tropicals by Prima
• Brushes - Artist's Loft round brushes size 5, 3, and 3/0 (I prefer plastic handle to wood because I tend to leave them in water and wood splits)
• Pen - Tombow Fudenosuke
• Acrylic paint - (see colors I used above, but HERE is a fun set of 10 other colors from Martha) 

* Note: I am a big believer in using what you have on hand to craft (especially with a mountain of vet/hospital bills), but if you're interested in some new, upgraded supplies, please consider purchasing through the affiliate links above. It will help with the mountain of bills! :) 

Grace and love to you,
Ann :)

... dedicated to Stomper and Abby...