Ivy Lily Creative

Bengali Princess watercolor painting wall art inspired by Indian culture. Sketchbook art and filming your sketchbook has been popular for a while. Have you seen MyPetiteCake's Sketchbook Tour ? I wanted to make a similar video, but my own sketchbooks are not much to look at. I use sketchbooks for getting ideas down on paper. So there's some text and quick, ugly drawings. However, I do have a lot of finished artworks. And fair enough, there are "My Artwork Collection" videos around too, so I made one of those instead. Or two. I liked the idea of flipping through a sketchbook and tried to mimic that. I had the camera pointed down towards my desk (see blog post about my camera set-up ) and moved each artwork from the right side into the shot and out to the left. That was a bit tedious to edit, because there was a lot of white screen between artworks. The other thing I tried was having a pile of artwork in front of the camera and removing one piece from the top at ...

Tulip Flower Bouquet. Watercolor on 250 gsm watercolor paper, A4 size. February 2016. We were given small flower bouquets at work last week for Valentine's Day and I decided to paint mine. It's nice to sometimes draw and paint from life rather than from a photo. I planned out the composition and colors in my sketchbook first and then sketched the shapes and flower details in actual size with a colored pencil on drawing paper. I drew out the final lines in pencil on top of the colored pencil sketch (that way the correct lines are easily seen, but I didn't have to erase anything). Then I transferred the drawing on watercolor paper using graphite transfer paper . I actually lost my A4 sized graphite transfer papers, which I'm really annoyed about, but luckily the small A5 size sample paper still works fine. You could sketch and draw straight on watercolor paper, but I prefer drawing on smooth drawing paper plus when I do it this way, I can use the drawing as a basis fo...

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 ...

As you may know, my favorite kind of storage boxes are old shoeboxes . I use them especially to store letters, cards, envelopes and art and craft supplies. Decorating them with magazine pages, used wrapping paper, book pages, decorative cardboard (Lidl's facial tissue boxes!), used stamps and old entrance tickets etc. makes them pretty and personal (and they're free , because recycling old materials) . The newest boxes I've covered using a collage technique. I cut out symmetric diamonds (rhombus shape), preferably several of each color/pattern and arrange them to cover the whole box. Cutting and gluing all the pieces takes a while, but I like the result. A shortcut is to cover a few sides with the diamonds and just glue whole magazine pages on the rest of them. Finally I cover the decorative storage box with contact paper so it's fine to wipe off any dust etc. without ruining the paper collage. I always do it in several parts and tuck the edges inside the box. I filme...

I made a Matryoshka doll birthday card for my niece's 5th birthday. The base is pre-cut pink card stock. I used my old matryoshka doll templates (ones I made for bookmarks and fridge magnets ) to cut out the top and bottom half of the doll from magazine pages and the face from beige copy paper (looks yellow in the photos). I also cut out the number 5 from a sparkly magazine picture. I used a paper punch to make some flower shapes and glued everything on the card base. I wanted to cut cut pretty borders for the whole card, but I had forgotten how dull my decorative border scissors are and only cut one side.  I used a black fineliner, colorful Stabilo fineliners and colored pencils to draw the doll's face and make up. White gel pen is good for bringing out the white parts in the eyes. Finally I wrote a birthday wish inside with a calligraphy pen (ZIG, Kuretake). Watch the video (card making + snowy winter views) on my Youtube channel. I also have a printable PDF with differ...