Snowflake & Star Vine - Free Painting Directions

You will need:

Assorted liner brushes

#4 lettering brush

or #4 flat brush

Assorted Star and Snowflake Stencils

Cosmetic Sponge Wedges

Decoart Americana

Black

Khaki Tan

Slate Gray

Bleached Sand

Light Cinnamon

Surface of choice, basecoated Black.

As always, these are suggestions.

Get something close and don't worry if they are not EXACTLY

the same colors.

I am always perusing the stencil aisle in any craft shop.

There are well used stencils hanging all over the bulletin board in my painting room.

You can't beat a stencil for adding perfect shaped stars to a project.

You can always shade and highlight them to make them look painted,

but it sure is a lot easier to stencil them than to try to draw or trace them.

There are quite a few snowflake ones hanging there also.

Yours don't have to be the same,

get creative!

I love cosmetic wedges for stenciling.

Just a little hint,

the ones from Dollar Tree are not quite dense enough.

Upgrade to the discount chain ones.

Frugal as I am,

I let them dry and then cut off the hard part and use them again and again.

It's the hoarder in me.

With a mix of Black and Slate Gray,

stencil the biggest stars here and there on the back ground.

Make them run over the edges and keep them random.

Vary the values in the mix of paint.

I like to have several liner brushes to vary the thickness and the look of the vines.

Experiment.

With a thicker liner loaded with thinned Light Cinnamon,

wiggle in your first vine.

Pick up Khaki on the brush and highlight the vine here and there.

With a finer, smaller liner, weave more vines in with thinned Black.

With thinned Khaki on the #4 brush,

paint in the leaves.

For those of you unfamiliar with stroke work,

these are just a stroke of pushing your brush down and lifting it up and pulling it toward you

with a quarter twist.

Practice, they are really not hard.

Paint them in decreasing size to look like wheat.

Using the thin liner,

loaded with thinned Khaki and Bleached sand,

connect the leaves.

With Bleached Sand and Slate Gray,

stencil in some small stars

here and there.

(Isn't that a nice fingernail?  I would like to say they are not always like that,

but I can't...constantly scrubbing paint out from under them!)

I tape out my stencils to suit where I want to use them.

So now you should have something that looks like this!

Now with Bleached Sand

and a finer, smaller snowflake stencil,

add some more snowflakes along the vine.

Then with a stylus, pen or the other end of the brush,

add dots of Light Cinnamon,

then Khaki,

then

Bleached Sand.

A little tip on this is make a new puddle of paint to dip out of.

If your paint is starting to dry,

your dots will be all wonky.

And there you have it.

Sound easy?

Just another hint.

If you don't have snowflake stencils,

or just want this for all year,

it could be done with bigger stars in the background

and smaller ones in the front.

Make it your own.

Just remember,

you are welcome to share these directions,

pin them,

anything. 

Paint this, sell it, give it away,

just don't take the directions as your own.

and

PLEASE

send me pictures of whatever you do with this!