DIY Artwork No12: Decorating / dotting a wooden postcard with paint

Finally, my dotting tool set arrived!

I have been waiting for this set for quite some time now and it was a bit of a bummer not receiving the set before moving apartments. Thankfully, the postman left a notice some days ago and two days ago I could pick it up. I couldn't wait to start using the different sizes of dots and decided to do something different this time. I bought a wooden postcard with the intention of decorating it and actually send it to someone in the future. I primed the wood the same evening and about a week ago, I started painting and dotting to decorate it.

I took my time to finish this work

I prefer having several different works at the same time so that I can paint every day and go with my current flow. If I focus on one project only, I sometimes don't feel the inspiration and then it just lies there waiting for me to finish it. Having several projects with a totally different feel helps me to paint every day.

I always browse the internet a bit for inspiration before I start dotting something new, once I'm in the flow I paint working from my intuiting. For some reason, I usually need to browse through some color pallets before I actually start creating my own artwork. This time I felt like creating a sunflower mandala artwork as the main topic and use bright colors combined with some brown.

The process

As per usual, I have made the process visible in steps of 4 each time. These are the first ones:

At this point, I decided to start creating something on the right side first. Probably a flower or something, This time I made some marks with a pencil, but I didn't use a compass because I didn't have a decent one until a few days ago while this project has been ongoing for at least two weeks now. I thought of giving the background some colors before starting to dot and paint, so I added orange and yellow.

I know it's not a perfect circle in any way, thankfully, I know that I can camouflage this most of the time by dotting or adding other decoration in a later stadium. As you can see at the zoomed-in pictures, the paint is quite thin for dotting and therefore often they seem to flatten a lot. I noticed this before obviously but as I have so little closet space for my crafting supplies for the moment, I don't want to buy a lot of new paint just yet. Maybe I should start using these thinner paints for backgrounds only though, to not ruin the hours of work that I put in it to finish. :)

The left picture gives me such a happy feel to it, and I'm feeling a sort of Mexican vibe at this point due to the colors used, and I think I'm going to add something to make it look like a flower. I did that using orange and tried to make them look a bit like flames/waves. The left bottom is a picture of when it was still wet, and on the right, you see how it dried up. It also helped that this was daytime again to take a good picture.

I actually love how I added more details to the flower in the first two pictures at the top. And then I got a bit lost on how to proceed, I also was in doubt (until the very last moment!) if I should leave the orange leaves as if or add decoration inside the leaves as well. I like the outer line of dots, but I felt this was enough.

Instead of focussing on the big flower, I decided to add a smaller one on the right. Yes on the right, I had to flip the painting because I found out I had the postcard upside down all along (oops!). I don't think it's very disturbing so I didn't stress about it and was happy that I found out before it was too late (who knows I might be adding something that can't be flipped later).

Let's be honest, the first picture is still fine, I like the shading of the brown and even what I did to the smaller flower in the right top picture, BUT then I wanted to add something at the right corner and started choosing the wrong colors and it looked like a completely messed up rainbow. I felt quite stressed and disappointed at this point and wondered how I was going to make this look less annoying.

At these moments, it's best to let that part go a bit and try adding some dots or lines at other places rather than looking at the "failed" part. I tried to connect the two parts, but then I decided this wasn't it either and painted the background pink to give it another feel hoping for a new sort of inspiration. I also covered up the corner with pink (you can see it didn't cover it 100%) and then it started to feel less annoying thankfully. At this time, I decided to just focus for a while and finish it so that I can move on to the next project. I felt that I already wasted too many hours on this one feeling annoyed because of ruining the right corner, so it was time to move on rather sooner than later.

I started to decorate the blue dots a bit and try to see if I could connect the colors of the other parts a bit. I think here it already looks much better than the previous picture. I also started to correct the dots and lines of the flowers because when I added the pink background, I accidentally ruined a few lines and dots here and there.
I feel it's almost done! Have a look at the last few pictures of the process before I found it was finally done.

And there it felt done, I now know that even when a part looks super ruined, I can polish it up by giving another twist to the coloring of that part of the painting. The next time that I will use a wooden postcard, I will probably see if I can paint a scenery for a change like I tried on the stones. On stones, it was quite hard to cover up mistakes because the surface under the gesso was slippery and I noticed adding more paint would erase the gesso layer making it impossible to correct. As I've never painted scenery on a wooden surface and now have some more tools, I want to give that a try next time.

One last time, the end result of this work:

I hope you enjoyed going through the process with me, and see you next time!

<3