Today, I'm going to take you through my process for creating a Polaroid style watercolor piece! The caption section is the perfect place to letter a word or short quote.
Materials:
Watercolour paper (precut works best)
Washi tape
Brush pens in various shades of your favourite colour
Waterbrush (or a regular paintbrush and a cup of water)
Pencil and eraser
Step 1: Use the Washi tape to section off a rectangular region, ensuring that the uppermost piece of tape shares the same border as the top of the paper. Keep the bottom piece of tape about 1.5 inches off the very base. This bottom area forms the lettering region.
Step 2: Get your brush pens ready! Here, I'm using Tombows 620, 665, 676, 636.
Step 3: Maintaining a consistent "order" of shading, colour in diagonal lines stemming from the bottom left corner and reaching out to the upper and right edges of the Washi tape rectangle. Leave some blank space in between each diagonal so that the colours have room to blend and naturally run into eachother.
Step 4: Use a waterbrush to blend the colours. Maintain the direction of the diagonals when you do so, and use lots of water for more exciting blending effects!
Step 5: Peel off the Washi tape to reveal the frame effect.
Step 6 (optional but recommended!): Sketch your lettering in pencil. I'm lettering the word "hope" on mine! While you don't have to pencil the lettering first, I find it helps a lot so that I can test out a few different styles and gauge how they'd look with the piece before committing to one. I actually had 3 different versions of "hope" before coming up with the one depicted below!
Step 7: Use a black brush pen to go over your lettering. You can use any colour you like really, but the main highlight is the watercolour design so keep the lettering reasonably simple!
Step 8: Experiment with other variations by changing up the colours and shading patterns. Here's an example of another one I've created in the past using blue tones and wavy lines!
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