Spatter Watercolor Tree Tutorial

Sometimes, it’s nice to have a project that doesn’t require a lot of precision or concentration. These spatter watercolor trees fit the bill — there’s no frustration, and you still get a great result! I decided to make postcards out of the trees, but they would also make for great art to hang in your home.

To make my watercolor tree postcards, I cut three pieces of 4″x6″ watercolor paper. You could get away with making your trees on regular mixed media paper or card stock; but watercolor paper is best because of its low absorbency.

Next, I moistened the “leaf” colors in my watercolor palette. Since I’m going to be spattering the colors, it’s nice to have them in a somewhat liquid state.

I prepared my first tools: a chopstick and a paintbrush.

And you’re thinking “… Why a chopstick?” I chose it because I thought it would be a nice thing to hit my brush against to make spatters. Of course, you could use virtually anything: a pen/pencil, another brush, a screwdriver, whatever, really.

Next, I saturated my brush with green.

And then I hit the brush against the chopstick to make spatters all over my postcard.

I continued with this technique …

And then I decided to add some strategically-placed paint runs. To accomplish this, I placed blobs of paint in certain spots on the tree.

Then I blew on them to make them go downward.

Next, I pulled out my trusty art toothbrush.

The point of the toothbrush is to apply a fine mist of paint to the art piece. To achieve this, you simply apply some paint to the toothbrush, then use your thumb to stroke the bristles, like so:

And voilà — the beginning of a tree form! This one is coniferous.

For the next tree, I started with the toothbrush spatter …

… and finished up with the chopstick hitting technique.

I repeated this with the third tree as well.

Here comes the fun part: painting in the watercolor tree trunks! I readied my tools, two little paint brushes.

Then I painted a simple trunk.

I added random branches {basically, abstract “y”-looking forms} to make the tree seem more realistic.

Then I painted in more green to give the tree a bit of depth — which is a totally unnecessary step.

I went on to tackle my next tree by repeating these steps, minus the shading.

{I love how this one turned out!}

And the third watercolor tree — the coniferous — didn’t take any work at all!

Here are all three of them:

In the way of postcards, these were looking a little plain to me, so I decided to jazz them up with some calligraphy and doodles.

Then, I added postcard elements to the back for ease of sending.

I really like how these turned out, and am giving them away at the end of the month to three participants of the TPK Challenge. There are three ways to enter to win one:

• Share a photo of your outgoing mail/August snail mail challenge piece on Instagram with hashtag #tpkchallenge.
• Tweet a photo of your outgoing piece of snail mail with hashtag #tpkchallenge.
• Share a photo of your outgoing piece of mail on the TPK Facebook wall.

Winners will be chosen at random at the end of the month. Thanks again for reading; may your weekend be filled with fun projects and lots of R&R.!

XO,