Salaric

    

June 8, 2008

Impressionist Landscape Card

Filed under: Art and Drawings,Paper Craft,Seasonal — sarah @ 3:16 pm

I made this card to send to my friend – I wanted to catch the essence of a summer/autumn landscape. I used one sheet of pale blue card because I thought this would look good as the summer sky in the backdrop of the picture. I then constructed the actual picture out of 3D paint pens: yellow, two types of green and a brown.

card

I folded the card in half to make a large greetings card.

grass

I wanted a very representative picture rather than one that was full of detail and I was also new to the paint pens so was concerned that trying to do too much detail just wouldn’t work. I took the slightly bluer and darker one of the green pens and drew grass along the bottom edge of the card – the grass was made up of lots of short vertical lines ranging slightly in size from 0.5cm – 2.5cm. I made sure they sort of wiggled slightly too, to make it look more like grass.

Hills and grass

Taking the second green pen, I added on two curving lines to represent the green rolling hills I had seen in the South Downs during my Duke of Edinburgh Award.

Landscape

I then took the brown paint pen and constructed what I think of as the ‘bare bones’ of a tree. I had it dominating the left hand side of the picture and let it grow organically from my hands rather than thinking about what it should look like. Again I held an image in my mind of the strangely desolate trees I had seen. It has no leaves because I felt it was late summer in a place that was normally quite windy, though the day represented was calm. They also may well have been too ‘busy’ for the card and ruined its composition.

One little flower

I then took the yellow pen and drew a small circle just larger than a penny and filled it in with the paint. Then I drew slightly wavy lines coming out from the circle, though I made sure they weren’t touching the circle. The paint pens are quite difficult to use at first and it is similar to trying to writing with icing. You have to keep squeezing the pen uniformly, which is difficult as there is steadily less and less paint in there to squeeze out.

The pens dry raised but they also dry transparent which I hadn’t realised and had initially picked colours for the pastel shades, but I was actually happier with the result when they had dried than I had been with the original.

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