Painting on a small stone with a cherry blossom tree

I bought a bag of flat stones earlier this week

I never noticed them before when walking through the hobby shop, because I've been hunting for them before I started creating art with dots. When I could not find them, I started making the salt dough ornaments to practice until I bought the wooden round ornaments in the hobby shop. The last time I was there to buy new ones, I suddenly noticed that they also sold flat white stones. I had no idea what I was going to create with these, and if you look at the first picture in the step by step process in the next paragraph, you will see how my stone looked for several days. Every day I was looking at it, wondering what (and how!) I was going to paint on it making it look at least a bit appealing.

The process

After a few days, I added the beginning of flowers by painting the stems and I have no idea why, but I also painted the sun at the top with my dotting tool.

This is exactly the reason that I need to have several projects laying around at once so that I can take it in, look at it several times a day, and suddenly an idea is born. This was the case here as well. I decided I was going to do an attempt to paint a tree, if possible some sort of cherry blossom. Just because I love pink blossom and it didn't seem like the hardest idea when I started it, so here it goes. Then I added the flowers and a bit more shades in the grass. I could not really see where it was going exactly yet.

The first picture above shows you a point where I already tried adding some blossom, which I was planning on creating with a normal brush, but for some reason, the smallest brush I had is lost, so I saw no other option than to use the dotting tool. I also already decided that the sun had to go to make the tree look normally shaped, the sun was absolutely useless above this tree. I covered it up with brown and pink, this was easy.

Several times I added more paint on the tree, flowers en the flower stems, and every time I thought this is not the desired result but I had no idea how to improve it. Every time the paint was still freshly added there seemed to be some sore of shade, but as soon as it dried it was gone. But I was happy with the covering up of the sun. Good choice :)

At this last picture above it was supposed to be finished because I was clueless what to do and decided to leave it as is. Until an hour later, where I decided I was going to mix a few shades of brown and pink to do one last attempt to create more shade on the flowers and tree.

And then I decided to add another shade of pink on the flowers and I felt I was done and should not touch it again.

So here it is, my first stone painting. Although far from perfect, I like how the cherry blossom turned out in the end. And I don't like the flowers at all, but I was struggling there :)

Practice makes perfect, so I shall practice this as well and probably start combining normal paintings with dot art more.

Thanks for stopping by!