Watercolor Heart Strings

1. Introduction: My name is Lucy diploma and I'm a graphic designer and mixed media artists from Victoria, British Columbia in Canada. This class, I'm going to show you how to create a series of eight watercolor hearts using a simple template, one color of watercolor, and a fun crayon resist technique. You don't need to know how to paint. It's all about textures and patterns and mark-making. You only need to know how to use a needle and thread. When you're finished, you can hang it up in your window or doorway. Or even better, you can put it in an envelope and send it to a friend. And that's guaranteed to bring a smile on the person receiving it at the end. That's for sure. As a bonus project, I'm going to show you how to use any paper that you have around the house to create a heartstring using a sewing machine if you have one, or you can just do it by hand. So I think it's time to send a little more love into the world. Don't you think? I hope to see you in class? 2. Materials: Let's go over the materialists, you'll need to create your heart string. So first you'll need to download the heart template in the project section. Then you'll need two sheets of card stock not too thick, because you're gonna have to so through it, so you don't need any fancy watercolor paper. You can just use some card stock from the office supply stores, and then you'll need the scissors and a pencil. Then you'll need a medium water brush or any other kind of watercolor brush that you like. I like the water brush because there's a fine point to make details, and you can also do larger wash with it, and then you'll need one color of water color and something to makes you paint. Then you'll need one white crayon, and I find that it's cheaper to buy a whole box of crayons for, like, $2 than to buy one fancy crayon at an art supply store. And the last thing you need is needle and thread. I like to use embroidery thread you can use. You could use regular thread, you would need to double it. And, of course, if you have anything sparkly at all used that and, ah, you just use a employed irregular embroidery needle with a sharp end and I think that's it . You're ready to go, so let's get started. 3. Tracing: So now we're going to create a template to trace our hearts on our piece of paper, on a piece of card stock. So you are going to take your piece, your template, and folded in half, and take a piece of eight-and-a-half by 11 card stock and folded in half and put it in between. And then you're just going to go around and cut both of them together. And then you just, you're going to use the piece of card stock as a template. And what I usually do is just cut around the edges so that I know have this huge piece of of cardboard to it's easier to move around. So we're going to try to fit, we're going to fit eight of them on this piece of paper. And you can put them in a row like that. And you can also, whichever way you want to do it is fine as long as you can fit eight on their page. 4. Painting: So the first thing we're going to do here, to do the first part of our hearts is we're going to grab our white crayon. And we're going to draw some textures and some lines and marks and patterns. You want to do a different patterns on every one of them, but you don't have to. You can decide that you want to have the same thing all over. And you can. But the way I like to do it is just kinda create a little pattern, a different pattern for each heart. The thing with the white crayon on white is that it's a little hard to see what you're doing. So you'll get a nice little surprise when you start putting the paint on it because you don't really know what's going to appear. It's kind of magic that way. But, but if you look at the side of the paper, when you do your white on white, you'll see the lines, but it doesn't really matter. It's just just kinda enjoy the process and it's kind of a blind drawing here and then enjoy the surprise when we put the paint on. Okay, so now this is where the magic happens. We're going to add watercolor on top of our crayons and you're going to see how cool that looks. So you see, it just gives this little resist effect. Almost like batik, I guess when you do it on fabric, but this is on paper. So I just would vary my color. Some of them I'd put a little more water on it. Some of them, I put a little bit more concentrated watercolor. And you can use any kind of watercolor for this. And you can use any color you want. And you can use more than one color. But I just decided to keep this exercise as simple as possible so you can just get done and be careful not to use too much water because it's gonna go right through this paper is not super fancy paper, but look at that beautiful. Now that everything is dry, we're going to grab our scissors and cut all the little hearts. And you'll be able to see your pencil line through the watercolor, so it'll be pretty easy to do. Now we're ready to work on the backside of our hearts. We're going to line them up. And you can see that I did put a little too much water on one of them because you can actually see that it went right through, but it's not a big deal because we're going to just paint over it anyway. So just play with lines and fish scales and polka dots and any kind of mark making a pattern that goes through your head. I really like this water brush because of the line quality and how I can just play with it and use it almost like a, like a marker. But you can use any kind of brush that you feel comfortable with. And, um, or even like any kind of mark making tool that you wanted to experiment with. 5. Stitching: Now it's time to stitch everything to get there. So first, I'm going to line my little hearts the way that I wanted to have them on my string. Then I'm going to grab a piece of embroidery thread and about maybe a meter or yard. And I want to, you want to put like a knot at the end of your thread for your first heart and go in and kinda tack it so you go in again and pull it in, start to thread the next one. So this is why you don't want to have something that's a little like a card stock that's a little too thick because it's gonna be hard to thread, but you can do it. It's just going to be a little bit harder. And then if you use too thin of paper, then it's gonna be a little flimsy, but that works too. So I want to have maybe about a couple of inches between all my hearts. So I'm just going to go and just do this to every, each one of them until I get to the end. 6. Bonus Heart String: In this bonus video, I'm gonna show you how you can make your own little heartstring using just the regular paper that you have at home. Like e.g. you might want to look for stuff that is double, that is interesting on both sides, e.g. like this paper, It's kind of cool. This is a magazine page, is something on the back. Anything with a texture map or anything like that. A lot of time would I do too, is I, I'll take music paper and I'll just draw watercolor on it. So let's do a few of these. And I'm using my little tablet here to decide where I want to have my heart. Like right here. I can decide, okay, I'm gonna do this as kinda cute, right? Dear. I'm just going to do that and then trace it so I can cut it. Whoops. Then there'll be something on the side, right? And same with any of these. I can decide where I want to place it. Same here, I can decide where I wanted to see. This is kinda nice. I might do it right in the middle. And on the map here, you can do as many as you want. You don't have to do just ate. You can do a really long string. You can find the town where somebody lives that you want to send them to and just do something like that for them. There's a lot of things you can do to personalize this little hoops, heartstring. Not really good at tracing. Alright, so we can just cut all of these and then we'll put them together on the sewing machine this time. So I'm not going to have all my little hearts here. And I'm going to just decide what order I want them in before I start stitching them. So I'm just going to look at color. And you can use, like I said, you can use more than eight. You can use less. I'm going to use I went just hear that dear. This goes here. And there's another one, the white one here. I think this is how I want them. So what I'm gonna do, this is a little bit too light. You can decide which one you want at the top. So I think that I'm not going to use that one. I'm just going to use these. So what I'm gonna do is I wanted to stitch the first one on my pile. So I'm just going to stack them with the way I want them. And then I'm gonna take them to my sewing machine. So I'm going to start sewing my little hearts here. I'm going to start with the top one. Just going to start and put my needle in here. The top maybe Tackett stitch back. Then I just start just let it go for about 3 ". And then I just put my next part in here. You want to hold that tight? So now I have my cute little heartstring all sewn up. I did break the last piece. It broke off. So I'm just going to not worry about it. And now I'm going to have seven hearts. So it's totally fine. And it's very sweet and they don't have to be all the same width or anything in between. It could just be an also your hearts can be all different sizes if you want. So you can do it whichever way you want. But this is one. 7. Merci!: Thank you so much for taking my class. I would love to see your heartstrings. So if you want to share in the project section below, that would be great. And if you want to share on Instagram, you can use hashtag, Lucy loves hearts. And you can tag me at Lucy do glow. And you can also follow me on Skillshare. So you'll be the first one to know when I publish a new class object though.