Ivy Lily Creative

Want to create a double exposure effect for your art, design or photo, where you'll have a silhouette of one image and another image inside it? I'll show you how to make three different versions of the same artwork or design for your print on demand shop using Photoshop: a silhouette, a double exposure effect combining two images and adding a gradient overlay. You can watch the Photoshop tutorial video or keep reading.   If you don't have Photoshop, you can start a * free 7 day trial , which you can cancel at anytime before the 7 days are up. Adobe also has student discounts and different bundles and offers, which I'll link to below, if you want to buy a Photoshop subscription. Disclaimer: Links marked with * are affiliate/referral links that let you support the blog / YouTube channel at no extra cost to you, if you make a purchase through them. * Start Free 7 Day Photoshop Trial   * Students Save over 60% on Adobe Creative Cloud   * Start Free 7 Day Creative Cloud T...

Want to remove the background of your artwork, design or photo? I'll show you how to turn the background of your artwork transparent using Photoshop, so you can use it as a sticker or a t-shirt design or a repeating pattern for your print-on-demand shop, such as Redbubble. You can watch the Photoshop tutorial video or keep reading. If you don't have Photoshop, you can start a  free 7 day trial , which you can cancel at anytime before the 7 days are up. Adobe also has student discounts and different bundles and offers, which I'll link to below, if you want to buy a Photoshop subscription. Disclaimer: Links marked with * are affiliate/referral links that let you support the blog / YouTube channel at no extra cost to you, if you make a purchase through them. * Start Free 7 Day Photoshop Trial   * Students Save over 60% on Adobe Creative Cloud   * Start Free 7 Day Creative Cloud Trial Select the background I showed you how to edit a scanned or photographed artwork by ad...

Want to fix up your traditional, scanned or photographed artworks for prints or your print-on-demand shop? I'll show you how to edit your artworks in Photoshop. We'll go though how to brighten up the colors, spruce up the contrast, make the art look sharper, crop and rotate, fix any small errors like dust particles from the scanner or paint brush bristles and see what's the deal with RGB and CMYK color modes! You can watch the Photoshop tutorial video or keep reading.

Want to paint an abstract splattered or smokey looking background with acrylics? I'll show you how to create it with sponge and splatter painting techniques I used on a Holi elephant watercolor and acrylic mixed media painting.

Have you ever wondered if you can mix charcoal and acrylic paint by painting acrylic over charcoal or drawing charcoal over acrylic? I tried it and here are the results. Read on to find out how to combine charcoal and acrylics into a mixed media painting without smudging the charcoal lines and the paint colors.

I've admired the willow balls and statues at Koiramäen Pajutalli (Doghill's Willow Stable) for a long time and so my first nature craft this spring is a willow ball. I think willow balls are the perfect decoration to hang in your apple tree or another big tree in the garden. It's not a completely solid ball so you can see the light through it (as in the shadow in the photo above), making a lovely silhouette. I shot the process on video . And I also made an updated version of a moss ball . Olen ihaillut Koiramäen Pajutallin pajupalloja ja -patsaita jo pitkään ja pajupallosta tulikin tämän kevään ensimmäinen luonnonmateriaaleista tehty käsityöprojektini. Pajupallot sopivat esimerkiksi omenapuun tai muun ison puun koristeiksi. Kuvasin työn vaiheet myös videolle . Tein myös päivitetyn version sammalpallosta . 

As I've mentioned before, I don't usually draw my sketches for paintings straight onto watercolor paper or canvas. I draw the sketch on a separate paper, where it's easier to erase and clean up the outlines and then transfer the finished sketch onto my painting surface. In this  blog post I'll list five different methods to transfer your drawing onto the painting surface. They're all either cheap or completely free. Some require a computer or other technology and some don't. So hopefully, if you're struggling with how to transfer your sketches, one of these methods (or a combination of some of them) will suite your budget and the supplies you already have available. Lyhyesti suomeksi alla.

Galaxy pencil holder. Galaxy crafts and paintings have been popular for a few years, but I just decided to have a go at it for the first time. I had fun painting the last yogurt bucket flower pots so I made a galaxy version of them. You can use these recycled yogurt buckets as flower pots for home decor or as pencil holders for desk organization . Scroll down for the instructions or watch how to make them .

If you feel like you never have enough pots for flowers or houseplants, this is a cheap way to make some cute ones yourself. You can turn old yogurt buckets into flower pots by covering up the original text and pictures with acrylic paint and removing the handle.  If you eat yogurt a lot (I do, with berries) and have a lot of these 1 liter yogurt buckets, you could make themed flower pots for different seasons (like red, green and gold for Christmas and pastel colors for spring). You can also use these pots as pencil holders etc. for desk organization. Watch the video tutorial or read on for tips and ideas on decorating old yogurt containers.

I have a box full of handmade envelopes I've made of old magazine pages, but I thought it would be fun to actually draw an envelope design. And since it's a black and white line art of tribal patterns, it doubles as a coloring page for kids and grown-ups. Both freebies are available for download and print here . Just cut, fold and glue together the envelope and it's ready to use for sending snail mail. Or you can color it in first just like the coloring page.

A couple of months before my last birthday, I decided I wanted to start making speed painting videos for You T ube and asked for a tripod for my birthday. My first videos turned out to be travel diaries, because those were a lot easier to film. By now I've also made some DIY tutorial and speed art videos and I thought I'd share how I got started with those by using tools I already had or just cheap or free tools. Why should you start a You T ube channel though, if you already run a craft or art blog? For one thing, it can be a lot more informative to watch video of an art technique or a craft project than just reading and seeing a few work-in-progress photos. Moreover, you can reach a bigger audience with videos than a written blog. My most popular blog post ( Sugar Painting ) has been viewed 2 , 1 00 times (based on Blogger statistics which exaggerate the number of views) while my most popular video has been viewed 8, 7 00 times. (Th is blog p o st was last updated in ...

These Spring flower sugar watercolor paintings turned out pretty nice (some of them anyway) so I decided to make them again with a Christmas theme this time. I, again, painted them with my 4-year-old-niece. For colors we used red, green and blue watercolor with some dots of gold acrylic paint to add a bit of festive sparkle. The paintings are postcard size and could be used as Christmas cards or framed Christmas art decorations. Sugar painting doesn't require any special painting skills, so you can do it with children. Read the instructions below or watch this tutorial to make your own sugar watercolor art. Or if you'd like to use the ones we made as watercolor textures for your graphics, you can download them here (for free!). They're JPG format, ~ 1000 x 1500 px, ~ 2 Mb, 300 dpi.

I made my first printable coloring book in July with ethnic themes (African and Indian Portraits and Patterns) . This time I wanted to make one of Matryoshka dolls, which I love drawing. There's 5 designs and they're all ones I had originally drawn a few years ago, but I fixed them up and added more details. The originals are A4 size ink and marker drawings which I scanned and edited in GIMP (turned black and white, added contrast, erased mistakes), put into a word file and saved as a PDF. And tested that they print correctly. Scroll down to see parts of the process on video and a very basic tutorial on how to color digitally in GIMP. I'm selling the coloring pages in my Etsy shop . I also have a free sample coloring page for you , wh ich you can download by cli cking yellow t he button below . Tein ensimmäisen värityskirjani (afrikkalaisia ja intialaisia muotokuvia) heinäkuussa. Tällä kertaa halusin aiheeksi maatuskanuket, koska niitä on vaan niin haus...

Decorated box number 6. If I counted right. And it's another diamond collage. I've now used that style for boxes, cards , flower pots and a painting . I made this one while having a flu (and the last one while having chickenpox...). It's not the fastest way to cover a box so it's good for times when you can't leave the house for a couple of days. The materials I used for this were essentially trash: an old shoebox, magazine pictures, paint chips and an empty tissue box (with a nice print on it). I cut out diamond shapes of pictures I liked using a stencil I drew before and glued them on the shoebox with regular paper glue. The final step is to cover the whole thing with contact paper to make it more durable (I took the photos before that stage).   Aarrelaatikko numero 6. Jos laskin oikein. Aiheena taas timanttikuviot. Niitä on tullut käytettyä nyt säilytyslaatikoihin, kortteihin , kukkien suojaruukkuihin ja yhteen tauluun . Tein tämän laatikon flunssaisen...

I stumbled upon this toilet roll flower wall art idea on youtube last autumn and started collecting empty toilet and kitchen paper rolls for it. I finally made the flower this summer and it's been hanging on our summer cottage wall since July. I cut up empty toilet rolls into 4 parts and glued them into a flower shape with water diluted general glue and used plastic clothes pegs to keep the glued surfaces together while drying. After the flower had dried, I spray painted it pink with a couple of coats. The end result looks kind of like a dahlia. I hanged it on the wall using 3 small nails so it doesn't tilt one way or the other.  Löysin vessapaperirullakukan idean youtubesta viime syksynä ja aloin kerätä tyhjiä vessa- ja talouspaperirullia materiaaliksi. Muistin tehdä kukkataulun vasta kesällä ja se on nyt roikkunut kesämökin seinällä heinäkuusta lähtien. Leikkasin tyhjät vessapaperirullat neljään osaan ja liimasin ne kukan muotoon vesi-erikeeper-liuoksella. Liima sai ku...

Indian and African Portraits and Patterns Printable Coloring Book. I finished making my coloring book this week and it's for sale in my Etsy shop . It's a 10 page printable PDF file. When the pictures were ready, I used Microsoft Word to make the PDF file and test-printed all the pages. To my surprise they had all kinds of little issues. So you should definitely print digital products yourself before selling them. The background of one picture was partly gray instead of white and the others had little black spots, perhaps dust from the scanner. So I fixed those things for the final version and that looked a lot better printed. If you want a free sample coloring page, you can get it here .  Sain värityskirjan valmiiksi tällä viikolla ja se on myynnissä Etsyssä . Kyseessä on 10-sivuinen tulostettava PDF-tiedosto. Kun kuvat olivat valmiina, tein niistä Microsoft Wordissä PDF-tiedoston ja koetulostin kaikki sivut. No, yllätyksekseni kuvissa oli kaikenlaista pientä korjattava...

I found an old color chart from the summer cottage to use as crafting material. I looked for ideas from Pinterest ( paint chip ) and ended up making wall art using the diamond shapes again. I cut out the paint chips and cut them and some magazine pictures into diamond shapes. The base is white packaging cardboard that I cut a suitable piece out of to fit in an A4 frame. I glued the diamonds and triangles on the cardboard using water diluted wood glue. Finally I wiped/scraped off the dried glue from the surface so the finished piece wouldn't look messy. Löysin mökiltä vanhan värikartan askartelumateriaaliksi. Etsin ideoita Pinterestistä ( paint chip ) ja päädyin tekemään sisustustaulun käyttäen vanhoja tuttuja timanttikuvioita . Leikkasin värit irti ja leikkasin timanttikuvioita sekä niistä että aikakauslehtien kuvista. Taulun tausta on valkoista pakkauspahvia, josta leikkasin A4-kehyksiin sopivan palan. Liimasin timantit ja kolmiot pahviin vedellä laimennetulla puulii...

I've been making a coloring book for adults this week. When I decided to make one, it was pretty clear I wanted the theme to be Indian and African portraits and I wanted it to have a lot of intricate patterns related to those cultures. (I have other themes in mind too, but I'm starting with this one.) The starting point for the pages was my previous paintings. I usually make a sketch for each painting on grid paper in pencil and enforce the final outlines with pen before transferring them on watercolor paper or canvas ( with baking paper or graphite transfer pape r ). So I started with those sketches, baking paper drawings and a few inked drawings I happened to have.  Olen tehnyt tällä viikolla värityskirjaa aikuisille. Kirjan teemaksi valikoitui heti intialaiset ja afrikkalaiset muotokuvat ja noihin kulttuureihin liittyvät kuviot. (Muitakin ideoita aiheiksi on, mutta parempi aloittaa yhdestä.) Lähtökohtana olivat aiemmat maalaukseni. Luonnostelen kuvan yleensä ensin r...

I made another twig heart for the summer cottage. I found the idea for this curly heart from a Finnish crafts magazine, but made a simpler, narrower version vs. the weaved heart they did. The wreath ended up on the front door at the summer cottage. I used birch twigs, iron wire, secateurs and cutters. If you want to see how I made the wreath, there's a video below.  Tein mökille toisenkin risusydämen . Idea kiemurasydämen muotoon löytyi Ihana-lehden numerosta 1/2015. Tein siitä kuitenkin yksinkertaisemman ja kapeamman version lehdessä esitetyn punotun sydämen sijaan. Sydänkranssi päätyi koristamaan mökin ulko-ovea. Kranssiin tarvitaan koivurisuja, rautalankaa, leikkurit ja oksasakset. Alla on video kranssin tekemisestä, jos haluat katsoa miten se syntyi.

I saw a tutorial in a Finnish crafts magazine ( Ihana ) on how to recycle old one liter yogurt buckets or containers into flower pots. They used fabric for covering the containers, but I opted for paper and the same diamond/rhombus shapes as for this box . I cut out more diamond shapes from magazine pictures and painted the containers with 4 coats of white acrylic paint. The result is not opaque and I found a better tip later on: you can remove a lot of the print on the containers with nail polish remover. I tried it and it works. You can use decoupage glue varnish for the gluing and finishing, but I just used water diluted glue this time. The process is a bit messy, but I like the finished flower pots.   If you want to watch how I made the flower pots, there's a video below or here .