An old college friend invited me to her wedding celebration, and it seemed the perfect opportunity to practice my drawing and watercolor. Instead of buying a card, I would make one, and since my gift was a donation to their honeymoon fund I had my obvious inspiration. As always, there were lessons learned through this process, but I’m also really jazzed with the final results! So, here’s the creation process:
To begin, I had to figure out how on earth one draws honeycomb without it looking like a bunch of poorly drawn circles:
I then erased most of my hard work and went over some of the honeycomb design in colored pencil:
I applied art masking fluid to the moon in preparation for painting in the background. Also added some splatters to the sky in the hopes of creating a starry night effect:
With the masking fluid dried, I drew in the bees:
I blundered at this point by thoughtlessly outlining the upfront bees in black ink, only to remember that watercolor involves, well, water and this would make the ink run everywhere. AHHH! My solution was to cover the bees in masking fluid as well and hope for the best:
And now for the first layer of the background:
I played with various shades of blues and pinks to create a night sky:
By this point I’d removed the masking fluid from the moon and bees (which fortunately looked alright) and painted over my honeycomb and began filling in details on my bees:
And voila, the final result:
I loved working on this project, and am really happy with how it turned out! It took a lot of doodling to learn how to draw bees that look bee-like. I think my favorite is actually the one in the top left corner, as it seems to fit the overall look of the painting the best. I’ll probably never use ink again on a project involving watercolor, unless I want that masking fluid effect.
I wrote on the back of the card: “Love is the sweetest thing.” A line from one of my favorite old-timey songs, which I am kind enough to share here as a completely random benefit of having read this far:
Compulsive Creation 