Do you ever look at something and know you must cover it in paint?  A cardboard box spoke to me.  Once I had the painted the cardboard the tree die cut started whispering that it was just what I needed. Once I had the tree things just started jumping out at me. Oh, my, this makes me sound a bit unstable…Good thing you understand about things talking to me…

I had such fun painting the cardboard, I thought I’d share the process with you.  I cut a box apart so I had big flat pieces.  I had just been to the dollar store and bought this pack of spatulas – for just a $1.  I knew they would be be stiff and that is what I wanted!

I squirted 3 colors of paint onto the cardboard.

I used a spatula to spread the paint around.  The spatula was firm but not quite as firm as a credit card so it allowed me to spread the paint but it didn’t blend all the paint the way a brush would have.  The spatula is my new painting friend.

It was still dark so I added a few drops of white while the green paint was still wet.  Once the paint was dry I ran it through my die cutting machine to create the trees.  I experiment with different colors and types of paints.  A bit of metallic paint adds a fantastic shimmer.

This tree was dressed up with some green glitter and vintage gems I bought at Tinsel Trading Company.  This let me get a vintage feel to my painty tree to go with the photo.

My Paint Party Friday piece with only 3 Colors? Really?  I doubted Diana Trout when she taught a class on using only 3 colors.  I shouldn’t doubt her.  She changed my world – I am now in love the 3 primary colors.   I did learn the hard way that cheap paints don’t color mix as well as artists grade paints such as Golden.  So, when I am color mixing I do it with the good ones.

Drew overlapping shapes.  Still doing lots of raindrops.  Perhaps if the sun came out more I would move past my raindrops. (Hint to Mother Nature!)

This stage took a while. I turned to filling these in when I was stuck  or feeling uninspired.  Just getting painty often invited my muse back.

So many different colors but it all works.  In the past, when I grabbed individual paints I would be unhappy with the look – but not sure why.  Now I know.  The colors did not look like they belonged together because they were made with all sorts of reds, blues, and yellows.

I love to add text to my pieces so I began to write about colors.  The recent Build A Rainbow Challenge over at Daisy Yellow inspired me to think about what the colors mean.  Everything written on this is somehow related to the color I was writing over.  I used a gray iridescent ink and a nub to write- must admit I was cursing the 18×24 size of it during this part!

It still needed something more and a happy accident came to my rescue.  I used the gray ink with my finger to shade the edges of the raindrops.