Easy Watercolor and Gold Ink Bookmarks

1. Introduction: Hi, friends. This is Kim from Play Art with Kim, and I love watercolor. And I especially love watercolor projects that are easy and gift. And that's what this class is about. It's a quick class. It's for any level at all. It's doable for anybody. And at the end, you're going to have beautiful bookmarks for yourself or to give away to others. I just gave a whole bunch to my mom's book club, and that was really fun to create. I keep a jar of bookmarks. If you still love an actual book like I do, I keep a jar of handmade bookmarks wherever the books are in my house so that they're at the ready. Okay. Are you ready? Let's get into. 2. How to cut your bookmarks: Okay. For these specific ones, instead of using scraps, I'm using a five by seven piece of paper. Actually, this is let's measure it to be clear. This is 7.5 by basically five and a quarter. I've divided that up and this makes 61 and a fourth inch bookmarks. I just go to one and a fourth and keep cutting them and then I'll have six bookmarks. I won't have wasted any paper, which is the goal always because watercolor paper is expensive, especially the good stuff. And by the good stuff, I mean arches. 3. Prep Your Bookmarks for Painting: Alright. In an attempt to be work smarter, not harder, I'm going to try and get these two. Yeah, this is gonna be hard 'cause they just all want to move. Sorry. Probably my hair is in there, huh? That one got a little thick. C just kind of move it. And I realize that one of these is thinner than the other. This one, I don't know what happened, but that's okay. Nothing else can be perfect. These are handmade, hand cut, all of the above, and people are going to be happy to get them. You can mark off a whole bunch at one time. Excuse me. And really make sure that it's pressed on because you don't want the watercolor to seep under. I'm just going to continue taping. Literally, this is just a piece of cardboard that came, I don't even know off a box or something and I just cut it down to a square. That way, I could use it to tape watercolor paintings on. You just want something that has some stiffness to it so that it doesn't buckle. Now you can get going on your next backgrounds. Again, make sure it's all pressed down. You don't want bleeds underneath that. You want a nice crisp edge. 4. Paint the Backgrounds: All right. My bookmarks are all taped down. I've made sure they're down really tightly and smoothly. I've activated my watercolors by adding a little water to each little cake and letting them sit for at least a minute. This set is a Brie se set from Staples. It's ten bucks and it's a real I love it. I love these colors. It's really cute and they're not super high quality, but they're actually pretty nice and for the price and for a bookmark, great. I'm just going to go in and just start painting my background. Just start getting the color over the whole thing. And if you want, you can kind of add some more color to one end to make it kind of an Embree if you want. That's a fun idea. You don't have to whatever you want to do. And I'm going to smooth out that that top there. Make sure it's all the same amount of water because otherwise it'll get a bleed. Now I have two waters, one for warm colors, one for cool and I've already messed it up, but just do as I say, not as I do. I try to do that because it keeps your watercolor a little pure the colors. Your warm water is already closer to the paint color that you're using, so it doesn't change the color as you apply it. Got a little piece of lint there. Get out. I just add more water once I have enough pigment on there. Just add more water and I want to add some more color down here. This needs more water, so I'm just going to Okay. Rinse it off. Let's go for a purple. You can wet these first and do the wet on wet or you could just start applying the color. I just don't think it has to be any difficult thing. You just get your water in there, get your paint brush in there and just keep applying water and paint until you like the consistency. This one's a little light for me, I might go over it again. That's the other thing you can do is if this becomes too light, wait for it to dry and do another layer of the same color, that's called glazing. You could do a layer of the same color or a different one, darker or whatever you want, but that is the technique called glazing. Let's do a blue. Chose the darker colors because we're putting gold on top and I want it to stand out the gold to stand out, so I want a real darker background. I'm going to leave that as an ombre situation there. Yeah, I did it right. See, I'm really working on that. Let's do a green. This one is a nice one. I mean, it's just as easiest thing and it's so satisfying, just to put color on cover up the white. When I was teaching third grade, we called it nail the white. Don't have any white showing, nail it. There we go. I might add a little bit more in down here. That's a real pretty color. Look at how satisfying this is. Cool color water. One of my favorite colors is this one. That'll be the last one. Just like this bluey green, of course, closer to teal. Grade out a little bit. It's real pretty. She doesn't name the colors in this set. But I made swatches, so I remember what they look like. Okay. Add a little bit more to this edge. Maybe a little bit. Whoops, wrong color. A little bit more here. There we go. Okay, so now you have to let it dry and you have to let it dry for quite a while until it's completely dry. Go get a cup of tea, get a cup of coffee, do something, or you'll be tempted to mess around with it. I'm probably going to add another layer of purple on to this once it's dry and then let that dry again. See you in the next step. 5. Paint the flowers: Alright. These have dried, and now it's time to pull the tape off. So it's important to pull the tape off at a 45 degree angle, if you can. Oh, I love this color so much. That All right, so here's these and now we're going to add some gold paint to it. This is Amsterdam acrylic ink in light gold. It's my favorite gold ink, and you really have to make sure it's all shaken up. It has an eyedropper, and I keep these little little plastic things from my pet. I feed our kitty little soups. It's called little soups, and these are the perfect containers because this is not like watercolor. Once you put it in there and it dries, then you don't you can't reconstitute it. All right. So here now we're going to get a small brush. A tiny tip and this might not even be small enough. We'll see. I'm going to get it wet. Rub it dry a little bit and get some paint. I'm going to start with this one. I'm going to paint these little flowers that are just four circles, touching each other, I can add more ink. Sometimes I go over this a second time when it's dry. I'm going to allow the flowers to go outside of the border. I'm just going to keep painting them. What a pretty color this is. I'm just going to keep painting little flowers and I can vary the sizes. I can make smaller ones, and bigger ones. I'm going to go back over some of them to just add a little bit more ink. So it fully covers the color below. Let's see here. It dries pretty quickly. We're going to go back in and put a different color in the middle. Don't worry about that little middle section because we're going to go fix that after this is fully dried. Another layer just to really ensure that we've covered. This one's a little too small. Covered the background fully. Excuse me. Okay. I think that's good. Now I'm going to rinse my brush again and wipe off the excess water, roll it so it gets to a nice point. I'm going to dip just a tip in and I'm going to start to make my my stems. It's hard to paint and talk. If you're a painter, you know that you get in your left brain and it's hard to make words. Anyway, here I go. I'm going to make just just the little stems going from every flower. I'm going to maybe even let that one come out and come down. Keep painting stems. Alright, we're gonna let that dry. Rinse the brush because this is acrylic ink, and you do not want that to dry on your good watercolor brushes. So let's see. Beautiful. So we're gonna let that dry and we're gonna continue doing that on all the others. 6. Fixing messy borders: All right, inevitably, you're going to get this situation. I mean, unless you're absolutely perfect about your tape and your tape is perfect and nothing goes wrong. However, I'm not willing to discard this one because actually this happened on a lot of mine. So I'm going to talk about how maybe we can make our bookmark beautiful still. It's no different than doing the last one like this. I'm just going to go be purposeful about where I go over the edge with my flowers. At the end, I may put a line around it like in this one, a gold little border. But first, I'll start with my flowers. On this one, I'm going to go ahead and just make sure that one of my flowers goes over that. To start with the places where it bled over and just kind of make sure that I Get flowers in those places. Make sure there's one here. Really the bigger areas. It's gonna be close together, but that's right. What do I say? Is handmade. Does not have to be perfect. So this area, it's okay. We'll put a flower here. Close to the ground flower. Then let's see. Just start filling it in. Also, breathe Kim. I hope that's not too loud in the thing, but it is a good reminder. Many of us, we tend to tense up and hold our breath when we're doing something intricate or that we're concentrating a lot on, and it's just a time to remember to breathe. All right, I'm going to put one right here. And probably in this one, I'm going to make that border, but I'm not sure till I get all the way through with my Flowers. I mean, these flowers are about as easy as it gets people. It's four circles, leaving some space in the middle, if you want. And of course, you do you. You do whatever kind of flower you want. You want to make it more intricate and amazing, do it. Whatever you want to do. This is just a spur on an idea or two for you. What you might do with these scraps when you're cutting your watercolor paper for cards or what have you. Is that actually on there? Yes, it is. I'm going to make a flower right there. I need some more paint. Remember this is Amsterdam acrylic ink gold. And it comes out with a dropper, isn't it so pretty? Beautiful. It's the best. Don't even bother trying any other kind because I'm telling you, I've done that. Too thick. Gonna wipe it off. Make some small ones around smaller. Smaller. And I see these bleds and they're kind of bugging me still. So what I'm gonna do, I've covered up the bigger ones that wouldn't be covered up with a nice little line. I'm gonna make between the flowers, I'm just going to come up with some gold. Cover up that. Those lines. See, easy. Easy to salvage and still make this beautiful. You want to really nice tips, you want to wipe off some of that bulbous paint. You know what I mean? When you get a big bulbus of it on the end, you're just gonna do that. See? Now, that looks a lot better to me. Maybe you were fine with the with the kind of rough edges. And I might have been fine with it, too, had it been all the way the same, but this is just my style of cleaning it up for my own aesthetic. And then I'll have to do the stems, of course. S, that looks nice. I like that. Okay. And Breathe. Alright. Where was the top and where was the bottom? Does it even matter? Well, this this way. Now I'm gonna do the stems. I like to come all the way off the bottom. Do as thin as you can to just as light touch with this. See how that got thick, but it's okay. You don't want a lot of You just kind of want to get it real straight up and down. It's like, very hard to get so light. Okay. You get the idea. A Beautiful. 7. A variation to try: All right. I wanted to show you one variation. Instead of the flowers, you can do a vine like this one. And for this one, I like to do the stem first. What I do is I just pin it down and take my thing in gently, start here and just make a meandering vine. Let it be and you could go over it again once you get your base down, just a meandering vine. And then we're going to make little offshoots of leaves. You do this and then your leaves are just basically like that. It's hard to mess up these leaves. I'm going to make a little one here. I'm also going to make sure that I get one over that section. But this one out here can turn it while you do it so it's easier. Again, go over that side, just as a nice stylistic design thing. Paint. Some might have three leaves. Again, just a little bit of ink goes a long way. You could always go over it again, but you don't want to get it too thick, or I think you'd be disappointed with so this one, I'm just going to try to cover as much as that I can of that smuchHever you want to say that, that mistake, that happy accident. See, you can barely see it. Even in this one, I added a line of gold around. That will cover up some imperfections as well. But again, these are homemade, handmade, so you don't want to have it be perfect, right? The answer is yes. Right. Right, Kim, you don't want it to be perfect. Fight your perfectionism. I don't really love that branch, but all in all, when it gets into the whole design, I won't notice it. I can kind of make that a little pointier and bigger. Okay. This one's go to go up. And breathe. Like I said, I forget to breathe when I'm concentrating and I'm working on that, so I got to take a deep breath. Lower my shoulders and just alternate where you're going with them. Leave a bit of the background in the middle. It's fun. Sometimes do that, sometimes don't. No one's just going to have one. And just have fun with it. Your leaves are gonna look different than my leaves. That's fine. Ah, I just love this color, by the way. This background color. It's just so pretty. Mm. Oh, that's a nice thin nice thin one. This one will have two. See that got a little thick and that's going to bug me, but practice what you preach, Kim. We're not looking for perfection here. I want to fill the space in a little bit. This one's going to be a bit longer. Well, I guess my leaf is going to go there since I made a thick line, but this one's going to go there. Go up a bit more. Remember, we can always go back over this to make it really cover that. Background color. All right. So look at that. That's pretty. You're going to notice your mistakes, but the person that you give it to or even when you get done with it, you won't because once the whole project gets complete, you just don't notice those little single issues anymore. Going over some of these, breathe. If you are a tendency to hold your breath, try to be mindful and making sure that you're breathing and calming your body while you do this painting is really just a beautiful way to calm your nervous system and get focused on something other than your daily issues, which we all have, right? When you're doing this, just focus on the paint and the colors. That's pretty nice. I don't think I'm going to do this one where I put an edge around it. I like it just the way it is. So call that one done. We've done two different ones. So far, beautiful. Okay. I'll talk to you in the next step. All right. I wanted to show you one variation. Instead of the flowers, you can do a vine like this one. And this for this one, I like to do the stem first. What I do is I just pin it down and take my thing in gently, start here and just make a meandering vine. Let it be and you could go over it again once you get your base down, just a meandering vine. Then we're going to make little offshoots of leaves. You do this and then your leaves are just basically like that. It's hard to mess up these leaves. I'm gonna make a little one here. I'm also going to make sure that I get one over that section. Put this one out here, can turn it while you do it so it's easier. Again, go over that side, just as a nice stylistic design thing. Paint. Some might have three leaves. Again, just a little bit of ink goes a long way. You could always go over it again, but you don't want to get it too thick, or I think you'd be disappointed with it. So this one, we're just going to try to cover as much as I can of that much however you want to say that, that mistake, that happy accident. 8. Finishing touches: Hi, friends. Well, you finish your bookmarks and they could be finished as is, but you can also choose to do some of these optional finishing touches. One of the things I like to do is round the corners with my corner hole with my corner punch, and that is listed in the supplies guide with a link to the one I use. And lastly, put a hole in the top with a little tassel. You can use string or twine or ribbon. Enjoy. 9. Conclusion : Oh, hi, friends. Hi, I was just reading. Wait a second. Let me get a bookmark and mark my spot. That's how great these bookmarks are. Have them at the ready. I hope you had fun in the class. I hope your project went well. Please post them in the project section because I always love learning from you guys. You put your own mind to it, your own creativity, and I always love to see what you do. So post your projects. I hope you had fun. Follow me on Instagram, Facebook and check out my website, if you'd like, and I'll see you next time. Bye. Uh