Skip to content
Something for St. Paddy's Day - Painting Shamrocks and Roses

Something for St. Paddy's Day - Painting Shamrocks and Roses

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.

 

A close-up view of painted shamrocks background
 
It creates a beautiful background that you can make as busy or as simple as you wish, and then paint some impressionistic roses right over the shamrocks for a really vintage, soft look. 
I painted these in Golden Fluids because the pigment is so brilliant. I mixed a few colors together and created a few shades of green and blue and it gave a really nice effect to them. 
Painting Roses on Shamrock Heart Magnets

 

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!

 

Leave a reply

Your email address will not be published..