Paint a Lemon Wreath with a unique watercolor painting technique using acrylic paints!

Hey everyone, and I'm gonna show you guys how to paint with acrylics today, but we're gonna do something a little bit different, and I'm gonna use them more like watercolors. So for those of you that haven't met me yet, my name is Christie Hawkins, and I'm the owner of The Social Easel, and Kasey and I are good friends, and she's letting me come visit her page for the day. Hey, Miss Kasey! So I've been— like, lemons are the new craze right now in home decor, especially lemon wreaths. So I've been wanting to do one, and I thought this would be a fun different style than what I normally do. And today I'm gonna do it in my mixed media pad. If you guys don't know what this is, this is kind of like a sketchbook for painting. So it holds acrylic paint, watercolor, all that stuff. And then it has perforated edge. This is an 11 by 14, so then I can take this page out and I can frame it. So I'm gonna make this lemon wreath sign for my kitchen today, and I'm gonna paint along with you guys. So I had Casey, because you guys know she's the queen of hand lettering, so I'm in her membership, but I'm still not as good as her, so I cheated and asked her to draw this up for for me really quick so I can transfer this on, um, to my piece of art. And then I'm going to show you guys, I'm going to sketch on a lemon wreath, and then we're going to water down some acrylic paint and kind of use it as more of like a watercolor piece of art that we're doing today. So just another way for you to use acrylics. So, um, just a little bit about, about me, um, because you're probably wondering who I am if you don't know me and Casey together. But I have also been teaching paint parties for the last 6 years, so I have a mobile paint party business instead of a brick and mortar like Casey does. And then for the last 2 years, I've taken that business and transitioned it online. And so now I teach women how to paint online in my membership called the Inner Tribe. So we only open the doors to new members a few times a year, and this is one of those times. So we are open this week until Thursday night at midnight and taking new members on. So I'm going to be sharing a little bit with you about what Inner Tribe is all about. And if you want to learn more about painting and how to become a better artist, or maybe you've never painted before and you've always wanted to, Whatever it is, we have women of all levels inside of our membership, and you get 3 paintings per month with me inside the membership. And then we have guest artists or business speakers each month as well. And you have access because we've been a membership for almost 2 years now. So we have a whole brand new website and we have over 60 tutorials and in that website that you can choose from to start wherever you want to. It's called Inner Tribe. Everyone in the group, we call ourselves tribe sisters, and it's this amazing community of women who are all like-minded and want to, you know, find joy in painting. And, um, you know, we use it for fun, we use it for therapy. There's a lot of women in there who have turned it into a business. So, um, anyways, that's a little bit about it, and I will give you guys some more details while we're talking. Um, but I just kind of wanted to give you a quick debrief of what the membership is all about. Okay, so the first thing I'm going to do, if you guys haven't seen a transfer before, this is just printed off my printer, um, and then I've got a sheet of transfer paper and I'm going to put my words down on here first and then I'll lift this up and show you guys. But all I'm going to do is just trace over these letters and I'm sure you've probably seen this before with Casey since this is her bread and butter. And this helps— the more you trace, this helps you with your hand lettering too, as I'm sure Casey's told you before. I just don't get to practice as much as I wish I could so that I felt as confident as she does. She does it so fast and easy, and it just always looks so pretty. I can tell you to thicken on your downstrokes so I know when I go back on here, I'm gonna make all my downstrokes thicker. But I'm excited to show you guys this technique with acrylics. Have any of you used acrylics like that before? Or let me know your painting experience, like what— how much have you guys painted, or have you painted at all? So this is really rough looking, but you see that transferred on there, right? So I'm gonna go ahead and go over this in Sharpie, and I love it because I get this question a lot in my membership, and they want, you know, they want to learn more about hand lettering, and I hand them over to Casey, and she's been a guest speaker in our group to help the ladies with some basic lessons too. So we partner well together. All right, so I'm still gonna look at that to make sure I'm getting my lines the way I want them. But I'm just going to start going over this. You want me to do this upside down? Can you guys see that? And I'm just going to go in and thicken these up. And then the live— so we're going to put Live Simply. These are just one run through with that is probably good. I may want to thicken them, thicken them up a little. We'll decide when we get to the end. I'm gonna turn this right side to me just so I don't mess this lettering up, because I really do want to frame this when I'm done. So right now I'm just going over the letters, and then I'm gonna come back and thicken them up. Karen, I don't believe there is a template available. I mean, I know not for the entire design. I'm not sure what Casey wants to do with her lettering, so That would be up to her because she did it for me. So hopefully you guys have fun today just learning a little bit more, some different ways you can use acrylic. So a lot in my group, I'll add like gel medium to— so I just use craft paint, by the way, and I'll add gel medium to it to make it thicker. And today we're gonna do the opposite of that, and I'm gonna water down my acrylics to kind of give them more of a watercolor look. And this would be best suited for— like, you could do it in your mixed media pad, or you could do it on watercolor paper. You could do it on canvas, but I think you're gonna get a, a better look from it on a different surface. So we've got Live Simply. Isn't that pretty? Her pretty lettering. And then I'm gonna start. I've got some waterproof black pens that I use, and I've got a couple different— sorry, my eyes itching— I've got a couple different sizes here, so I'm just gonna play with them. So this is gonna look really like— hopefully this makes sense— like sketchy. So like I started kind of like just practicing a little bit. I on the sheet that I printed off from Casey. So when I'm doing this style of art, um, and you'll probably see this in some of Casey's stuff too, this isn't about having exact precise lines. This is a very loose flowy style, um, and more like a sketch than like a perfect like template, so to say. Um, and then we're going to fill in what I've done with the design and then we're going to water down some of our acrylics. And kind of fill that in with color. So I'm just going to start, um, that's not the one I want. I think this is. So it's very skinny, it's like a 0.3, but I'm just going to start kind of— I'm just going to give myself like a little circle, and it may not be exactly centered, and that's okay. And we're going to start adding just a bunch of little leaves around here and then start adding some of the lemon shapes on, and this will start coming together. I love doing wreaths too. You can do these in so many different styles. We may come back and add add some gold on at the end. So this is one of my favorite products, is this gold DecoArt pen, and I love adding— I've done a lot of Casey's lettering projects with watercolor, and then I come back and add the gold marker on there, and it just adds that little, little pop. And you can decide how heavy you want your lemons. I'm trying not to do an exact pattern, so I want them to all be a little bit different. Maybe add some little extra little white flowers, or maybe these are going to be gold at the end. I'm not sure. Can you guys see that so far? So you can see how loose I am with this shape that I'm doing for the lemons. So the best way I can describe it is it's kind of like an egg shape, and it'll take on more character and, you know, look more like a lemon once we start adding in all of our colors. I'm going to flip this around to finish it off real quick, and then I'll show you guys. And I'm choosing to do like these really skinny, dainty leaves. There are tons of styles of leaves that you could do on here, but hopefully this will give you some ideas of— maybe you want to do a fun wreath sign like this. So you can always go back when you're doing this style with We're gonna start with this kind of as my sketch, but as I'm filling this in, if I decide I want some more little flowers in here or some more leaves, I can always come back and add them. And this is what I like about doing this style too, because like I said, it's very freeing. This is definitely not about perfection, so it's okay to be a little messier and sketchier, and you don't have to have your paint color inside the lines. So like if you look at watercolor prints and art, you'll see a lot of them that would have the black outlines. They're not always right on the edge of where that paint color is. So that's what I mean by kind of loose and freeing. So in my membership, I try to teach women not to be so, you know, it's supposed to be fun. It's supposed to be relaxing. So I don't want you to be so serious and you're so worried about getting it wrong. That it paralyzes you and it stops you from getting going. So my goal is to help you get past that barrier, whatever stopping you from being creative. If it's fear or you're worried it's not going to be good enough, all the things, we all have self-doubt. But my goal is to make things easy and simple enough for you to follow that you have the courage to try it. Because I feel like even those of you who say I don't have a creative bone in my body, I think we all do. And I think that God created us in His image and He's the original creator, and sometimes we just need help getting that out. And that is my goal, is to help you do that. So I'm gonna get— I already probably put way too much paint on there because we're gonna water these down, but I'm getting This is my favorite green paint from DecoArt. This is called Desert Cactus, and then I'm using a Banana Cream are the two colors I'm using. We'll get some white on here. And let's see, what else do I want to do? Anything else right now? I may start with just these. I did bring some gold paint also and my gold paint pen because gold and yellow look really pretty together when you're adding them. Okay, so I'm gonna start with my lemons first. So I've just got a filbert brush. This is a size 8, and I'm just gonna basically So you guys can see this. I'm just gonna water down my paint, and you don't have to water this down completely. Again, I just kind of want to mimic the look of watercolor here, so I'm choosing to do that. You could still leave it thick and still come back with a pen and add these accent marks in. And then we're just gonna start— I'm gonna start filling in my my lemons first, and we'll kind of go from here. And you don't even have to fill in the whole thing, so you could leave some white areas, which is something a little bit different about when you are working with watercolor. When you want like highlights and stuff, you actually want to leave it bare and let the paper show through. So again, I'm doing this very quickly, loose. I've got my watered-down acrylic here. What do you guys think so far? Can you see it start coming together? And then I'm gonna switch. I'm actually just gonna leave this in here. I'm gonna grab some water and start grabbing some of my green. Good, I'm glad you guys like it so far. Let's grab just a little bit more water. And also you can have, like, depending— like, if I want this darker in some areas, then I would let it be a little stronger. I wouldn't add as much water to the acrylic so that it had some variation in there. Like with this, maybe I just focus more along the edges, and then I could come back with just a little bit of water and in my brush after I do this and just kind of soften that out. But this is a really fun technique if you haven't tried it before. Have any of you ever done— used acrylics to mimic watercolor before? Thank you, I'm glad you guys like it. The green is Desert Cactus. It's my favorite. I will say using acrylic is a little bit more forgiving than using watercolor because when I go over like my lemons and stuff, I can make that green a little bit thicker and it's not as transparent, whereas with watercolor it's a little more difficult to layer them together. Not impossible, but I think it's a little bit easier with this. But hopefully you can see how loose I'm being with it, and I'm not at all concerned about getting right inside of the lines or matching those exactly. Thank you, Miss Linda. I'm glad you learned something new. Yeah, this was one of those ideas that I knew I was coming on Casey's page today, but if you know anything about me, I don't, I don't like to plan ahead too much. I'm kind of a last-minute person, and I was really trying to think about what I wanted to do on her page, and I knew I wanted to do a wreath like this, and I was like, oh, that'd be so fun to make it like a Make It Like Watercolor lesson. To show you guys. So inside my group, if you have fun learning from me and you think you want to learn more about painting and learning different techniques and all the different ways you can do it, inside the membership, most of the time my Facebook lessons or my painting tutorials— I call them Facebook because we do them inside our, our private Facebook group— are done live, and I'm usually chatting with you you guys kind of throughout. So it's a pretty personal experience. You guys can talk to me while I'm teaching, and then all of those videos are available for replay whenever you want them. So inside the membership, it's $47 a month or $470 for the year, and you get 2 months free if you do the year option, and it renews each month until you cancel. If you cancel, you can cancel at any time with the monthly membership, so you're not locked into anything. If you do the yearly membership, you are locked in for that year and then you can change it after that. You can cancel, move month to month, whatever works for you. Um, and let's see what else. So, um, that gets you the 3 paintings with me per month that go into our Facebook group and then one local or not local one, um, guest artist or speaker. So all that happens inside our Facebook community and then we have a membership hub on a separate website. That hosts all of our, all, all of our videos. So all of our videos since the beginning. We have over 60 painting tutorials for you to choose from. They're all separated by category. You can just scroll down and say you want to do a farm animal today. We've got a collection of farm animals, or maybe you want to do a landscape, and they're all organized in that way so that you can just go and pick whatever it is you want to do. So we've already had— we opened the doors Sunday night, and we've had so many women join and immediately start painting, and it's so fun. They're already posting in the group, and that's where we share, is in the Facebook group. So you can do your art and then share it in there, and you're just surrounded by this loving, awesome community. I can't say enough about our Inner Tribe because it's this group of women that just lifts you up and loves on you and gives you so much encouragement. And so many women have found self-confidence by being part of the group and just having that positive, encouraging place be. And it's so important to surround yourself with those people because we all need that in our life. There's enough negativity in the world. I try to make my group your kind of safe haven, your escape from everything else, where you can come and relax and be with your friends who are as excited about painting and art as you are. And you do have— let's say you want to do like paint party business, or you want to sell some of the things that you've learned to create inside the membership. You have permission to do that. So you have rights to sell your original pieces that you create from mine. So you can sell them on Etsy, you can sell them like in a craft show or like a booth in a flea market. However it works for you, you have permission to do that. And if you do paint parties, you have the rights to teach these at any of your local paint nights. So Casey is actually a member of my, my membership too. So I can't remember which one she taught a few months ago, but she's able to use my designs in her art studio if she chooses to. So that's just another, another benefit to being a part of it as well. What do you guys think so far? Do you like it? So I'm trying to decide I think I want to go in— I'm gonna get a skinnier brush and these little extras that I added around here, these little like floral things sticking out. I'm just gonna trace that line a little, maybe add a couple lines throughout here. Let me know if you guys have any questions. About the membership or about what I'm doing right now, anything you want to ask me. So it's just this really loose, fun style. I'm trying to decide What do you guys think that I should do with the little dots that are like my little flowers? Should I make them white? I mean, we're on a white background. I could still put some white in there, or maybe like a little pale pink with the white might be pretty. Maybe add a little gold. I'm gonna water down some of this gold paint that I did, and I'm gonna use this as an accent in my lemons. So they're not just one note. We're gonna change it up a little, maybe get a little bit of shimmer with them. And tell me if you guys can see that on video, the difference of what that, that looks like adding that in. Can you tell a difference? Linda says pink and white and yes to the gold. And I love this because, like I said, you know, some of your lemons may have a ton in there, some may have a little less. We don't want to try to, you know, mimic and copy each one that we've done before. Let them all be a little bit different. Yes, it adds some of the depth to it, and you could even go darker if you wanted to. Like, I could get just straight gold on there and even have some really dark sections around it, but I like the way it doesn't blend all the way to— I don't know if you can see that with the way the light is hitting that. You can definitely see the metallic, but again, that's the style. And then, so maybe we want to do the same thing. We're just going to try this, get some of this. This is a dark Hauser Green, which is kind of like a dark hunter green. I'm going to get a round brush here and just water this down. We'll add a little depth into our leaves too. What do you guys think, adding those little touches in? Can you start seeing how it makes it look like more of a complete or finished painting. And it's simple little things. It's not like, you know, what I'm doing is super hard. It's just adding those layers in and just deciding where you want to add a little bit of depth in there. But I really like it with the darker green. What do you guys think? I think it's starting to come together. And now this might be my new obsession, painting this way. And really not that hard to paint upside down for you guys either. I'm doing— I don't think I have it here. Maybe I can pull it up for you on my iPad. So I did a digital sketch of an Easter Bunny that we're doing inside of my group this month, and it looks like watercolor, so it looks really similar to this. But I was planning on teaching it in acrylic, and so then I asked the group, like, I showed them the image, and I'll show you guys, I'll pull it up on my iPad. I was like, what do you guys want it in, acrylic or watercolor? And it was like 50/50, like, because they're, they're completely different styles. So because I do this a lot inside the group, because I just love to show you guys stuff, I want to, I want you to, you know, break past those barriers and look at art in a different way and just have fun exploring and trying new things out. So long story short, I'm doing both versions. So if you join, that will be one of the See if I can set this up for you guys. That will be one of the— or actually two, two of your lessons. You get a bonus lesson this month— will be this Easter Bunny, and I'm gonna do it in acrylic, and I've already got him sketched on like an 18 by 18 canvas, and then I'm gonna do a watercolor version of him that's gonna be really similar to this, and I could, I could do watercolor or I could show them with acrylics and show it like this, which actually I think that might be a better idea because they already have all these supplies. Then they don't have to go out and buy watercolors. So all the ways you can use craft paint. Let me find my picture for you. Hopefully I have it saved and I'm not having to search for it. Oh, I know what I can do. Because I designed it in this program, let me pull this up. So hopefully you guys— can you see my bunny? Are we getting a glare? So this— I did this sketch digitally in this program called Procreate, but that sketch is like a watercolor-like design. So again, it's hard to make it look just like that if we were doing like thick acrylic paint, but that's the Easter Bunny that we're doing this month, and I am going to be teaching it in watercolor— or watered-down acrylics, I should say— to mimic watercolor, and then we're going to do an acrylic version as well. So here's what the big one This goes with my farm animal collection, or the size of it, I mean. I don't even know if you can see the sketch on there. But so we're gonna have a little baby version with the watercolor style, and then we're gonna have a big one that's gonna be the size of my farm animals that I have inside of the group, because I want a big— I want a big painting up in my house. I want a big Easter Bunny up for Easter this year. Okay, so I think I've let this dry enough while I jibber-jabbered with you guys. Okay, we're gonna do white and pink. That's what we said. I get easily distracted. This is Cotton Candy. I'm just gonna get a little dot of it because we do not need much at all. Get some water on here. I'm gonna get some white and pink mixed together, and then I'm mixing my water with it too. We'll see if this little pop of color adds to the painting. It may be so subtle that you can't see it on video. I think you can see it. Can you guys see the pink showing up? I'll hold it a little bit closer in just a second. I think I need to add another one over here. Maybe some on the inside. So this is what I mean, you can just add to it as you go, kind of just build it and start deciding where you want things. Tell me if you guys can see the pink showing up at all. Just fill in those little dots. I think I like that addition to it. Hold it a little bit closer. Might be a little hard to see on camera, but in, in real life it looks good, and it's just that subtle pop of color on there. So now on your dry areas, we could go back over if you want some of these black lines to show up a little bit more. You can come back over with some more lines on top, and again, I'm just doing this very sketchy, and I could even switch pens and have a little bit thicker black. So we may do that in some areas. Let me go around with this, and then I'm gonna grab one that's a little bit thicker. You can see those extra little lines I added on there. And then we'll grab this one. This is more of like a brush pen. And again, I am not outlining the entire thing. I'm just loosely kind of going along some of the edges. So it just makes those black lines a little bit more pronounced. So normally I would be adding gold, and I may even add it in my lettering normally, but I actually like the simple black on the inside. I'm probably going to add— I'll show you how I'm going to add a couple gold highlights on my lemons with the gold paint pen, but I don't think I'm going to add it to the lettering. It may be easier for you to see once it's dry. So what do you guys think? Did you like this little project? Does it make you want to try out your acrylics and water them down and play with them and use them like watercolors? I hope so. So let me know your thoughts. I'm gonna do a quick recap on my membership just for those of you who didn't hear in the beginning. And see if you have any questions, let me know. But the basics are the membership— you get 3 paintings with me per month and then 1 guest speaker, and it's $47 a month or $470 for the year. That's your monthly content. And then you also get access to our entire membership site with over 60 painting tutorials and live Q&As, technique videos, templates for all the different paintings that we have, extra bonus videos of like color mixing and shading and all that kind of stuff. So it's all about you learning to become a better artist and finding that joy and passion in painting. So, and the best part is you get to be a part of this amazing community. So if you guys have any other questions, feel free to ask Casey. Or myself and just use her link above so she gets credit for that as well. And it was fun painting with you guys today. This was really fun, and now I'm excited to tear this out and frame it. Yes, get a mixed media pad. You will love it. It's like a big sketchbook for painting, and you can try all kinds of stuff out with it. So thank you guys for hanging with me today, and thank you, Casey, for letting me visit your page, and I will talk to you guys soon. Bye!