Today is My Lucky Day Tonal Study

Today is My Lucky Day Tonal Study

Posted by DecoArt on Aug 5th 2015

Today I want to challenge you to use just ONE product – one color to create a fun and colorful art journal page. It's easier than you think, and the practice of layering, and teaching your eye to "see" is great fun.  

Items Needed:

  • Assorted Brushes
  • Well Palette

Instructions:

To start, you'll need a page from (or in) your art journal, clean water, a palette with several wells, a couple of soft brushes in various sizes and one color of the DecoArt Media Misters. For this study, I chose red.

Instruction Image #1

While it's not required, I like to create a border on my page, it helps me fence things in – but I often go over the line, and that's ok. I first watered down the entire page with clean water and while that was soaking in a little I poured a teaspoon or less of the red Media Mister in my palette. Then I watered it down so it was just a very transparent red. When I was satisfied that it was light enough, I painted the page. I had to walk away at this point and let the page dry completely, it was tough because I couldn't wait for the next steps.  

Instruction Image #2

When the base layer was dry, I used a pencil to draw a repeating pattern of some leaves you might find in your garden.  

Instruction Image #3

When I had filled in the bottom 2/3rds of the page with little leaves, I dipped my paintbrush in the undiluted red Media Mister and added it to the watered down mister that I had painted in the background. I wanted to darken that up just slightly so the first layer of leaves would be just little shadows in the background. When I was happy with that color, I painted all the leafy designs I had drawn in.  

Instruction Image #4

Instruction Image #5

When that layer was dry, I repeated the process, making the Mister slightly darker again. I kept repeating the process until I liked the way it looked.  

Instruction Image #6

When the entire page was dry, I used a white gel pen to trace the outlines, making sure the lighter ones were fading off into the backgroiund and the darker ones were front and center on the page.  

Instruction Image #7

Instruction Image #8