Snugglebug University: Geometric Watercolor Art for Your Walls!

Sometimes I feel like my creative projects are always all over the place. A sewing project. An art project. A home project. I'm sorry guys! Sometimes it just seems like I can't concentrate on one subject matter. I love creative projects...and I love trying new things! Lately I've been drawn to art, and well, decorating my walls.

I've been so inspired by all the beautiful watercolor art pictures showing up everywhere, and I wanted to try to make my own. What I love about this post today is that it has a little bit of water coloring (by hand!), some photoshop, and the whole process feels a bit like using rubber stamps. Oh, and did I mention it's easy? Yeah. Super easy. I think the technique could be really fun to make some awesome art from kids' doodles too....so put this project aside for mother's day!

But before I get to far along, I want to give some shout outs to some super inspiring work. First this tutorial on how to make brush presents. It was this post which first got my head turning about how to "stamp" in photoshop. I was also inspired by this beautiful fabric, and this beautiful illustration work.

When I was in high school and college I'd fill my notebooks with geometric doodles. My teachers would always think that I wasn't paying attention, but in reality I felt like I could concentrate better on what they were saying when I was doodling. There's something about this project that reminds me of those doodles! It's kind of brainless and fun.

Are you ready to get started? Let's go!

All you are going to need is some watercolors, a camera, and photoshop!

I started out by painting a bunch of watercolor shapes on a piece of paper.

I I experimented here, painting everything from basic shapes to making splatters.

I took pictures of my watercolor pictures. You don't need a fancy camera here...I've even used my phone camera before!

Then I opened the document in Photoshop and one by one, adjusted the levels (Image>adjusments>levels) to get rid of the textured paper background.

I copy the individual shape into a new document, and clean up any of the edges as necessary (such as with the eraser). This gets rid of anything texture or splotches that you don't want.

Then you're going to select the shape, and make a brush present. To do this, go to EDIT> Define brush present. It will ask you to name it.

Then open a new document, select the color that you like, and select the brush you just created. It's just like stamping with rubber stamps! (Except even better because you can adjust the size, orientation, etc.).

At this point I just kept adding on more than more shapes that I made brush presents. I work in several different layers to make it easier if I want to delete something.

Eventually my art looked like this!

Then I started to play around with different images:

Seriously so much fun!!! Go try to make your own! I'd love to see what you come up with!

Finally, I just want to give a big shout out of THANKS to those of you who started "officially" following me via email, facebook, instagram or pinterest. I'm really trying to build my "following" and every "like" really helps!

If you liked this post, you might like some of my other art posts:

An Eric Carle Inspired Art Day: