Recently I was watching a YouTube video from Emily Olson, and she did some word art that I thought was really nice. If you remember a while ago, I wrote about inspirational quotes that I love. I still love them, and I still have quotes hanging in my home. But this was a fun art project that I could use to decorate my home, as well as inspire me, that I made myself.
Picking words was interesting though, I wasn’t sure what I wanted to write that would fit me for a while, although it was fun enough that when I decide to change the quote, I can just make a new piece of art. I also thought it would be a quicker project that it was. The first one I picked was a 3-word quote, and I was in a hurry to finish it. Consequently, there are things about it that I don’t like. If you look closely, you can see that the lines of paint are not as clean around the words, at least not as clean as I would have liked them to be, however standing back it doesn’t look too bad. But I had a little bit of time later in the day, so I did another with just one word. This time I really took my time to set it up, trace more carefully, and especially paint more carefully. I was pleased with how it worked out.
This is a great project to use up scrap paper and wouldn’t have to be done in watercolor. If you love markers or colored pencils, even acrylic on canvas would be fun. I would suggest shorter is better, and one word is great. You will need a computer unless you have really good handwriting. I used a word processing program to pick a font that I liked, and to make it about the size of the scrap piece of paper I was using. Also, and Emily covers this in her YouTube, you’ll want warm colors and cool colors, I used the warm colors for the letters (red and yellow, mixing to make the orange in places) and the cool colors for the background (blue and purple in one, and blue and green in the other), but you could reverse that as well.
When you get it printed on regular printer paper, you could use transfer paper if you have it. I just use a number 2 pencil and scribble darkly on the back, flip it over and tape it to the watercolor paper. Then I carefully trace around the words, being careful not to rest my hand too heavily on the paper around where I’m tracing as it will rub some of the pencil off on the watercolor paper. If that happens however, you can use a clean eraser to lightly remove the smudges. If you paint over them with watercolor, they become extremely difficult to remove. The above image was the first one I made, and the one below was the second one I took a little more time on. If you have a word of phrase that inspires you, this is a great way to remind you of it every day and makes a great piece of art as well!
Stephanie Richey Art 