St. Patrick's Day is almost here and that means for us here in New Hampshire, Spring may be right around the corner!
It's no secret how much I love roses, but I also love shamrocks too. So its not a surprise that I was inspired to combine the two and paint these vintage-style Shamrock and Roses canvas heart-shaped magnets.
Did you know you can make shamrocks with a heart stencil? I use a stencil on the background of this design and then paint and shade over it to soften or darken areas with blues and whites.
On some of these, I added some soft circles with blue and green accents that look almost transparent in the background.
To give these a transparent - almost watercolor effect to the acrylic paint I use a blending gel medium and work it into the brush then pick up just a small amount of the paint and work it into the brush.
I test it out first, to make sure its as translucent as I want it and then add in the circles here and there.
You can paint these also by following along with my Shamrocks and Roses painting tutorial PDF I have available here. Some of the sample photos on this page might give you a better idea of what the design is like.
In the tutorial, I share how I use a small heart stencil ( any kind of tiny heart stencil will work with this project ), but I recently found a great miniature heart stencil from my painting friends Sandy McTier and Tracy Moreau. They have created their own stencils called M2 Squared that they sell on their sites and so I wanted to give it a try for this design and it worked great! I highly recommend using it! You can find the stencil here to order.
Let me know if you get a chance to try out the tutorial I would love to hear from you!
Until next time!
Happy painting!
