Embroidered Collage

Another of my strata ideas involves my beloved watercolor crayons.  This time I put cutting guidelines on the watercolor sheet!  Then I drew lines, one color at a time, spreading across each card in curves with some elliptical focal points.  I would layer another color next to it, sometimes with a space between.  For my last step I worked with three colors simultaneously - the yellow, red, and dark blue.  Unfortunately it didn't occur to me until afterwards to take work in progress pics, so all I have is the finished drawing, which I think looks pretty cool!  I wasn't quite able to do the color scheme I was after either, due to limited colors of crayons.

And then came the water.  I had deliberately avoided placing the blue next to the yellow (although I goofed a couple times) because I didn't want green at this point.  This part was FUN.  I was trying for some flowiness between the colors, a little bit of blending into each other.  That part didn't work as well as I hoped.  There were too many places where the flowing took over the pattern more than I wanted.  You can see what I mean in these cut up 3x4 pieces.  The one on the right is what I was after.  The one on the left has colors and lines that merged a bit more than I intended.

I'm not done with these yet.  I want to enhance some parts with more crayon and others with colored pencil before I cut them down to size.  I may even try a little acrylic paint on some, just to experiment with the mixed media effect.  But this was successful enough that I will definitely be doing it again and probably trying out a different color scheme while I'm at it. 

Another direction I could take this idea would be to do it with acrylic paints.  Then I could play with harder or softer edges, depending on how I applied the paint and whether the ribbon next to the one I was laying down was wet or dry.  Maybe some ribbons would be more textured and some would be flatter, also.