Wildlife Cards

As I've been making my animal icons, it's seemed a shame to have only one use for those tiny paintings.  Fortunately, I scanned them before I put them under the glass, so I have the images to continue to work with.

I decided to use them in blank greeting cards. I'll sell the finished cards in my Etsy shop to benefit Sierra Wildlife Rescue.  My idea was to paint a single "frame" to surround the round animal portraits.

So I began by penciling out a 4 1/2" x 5 1/2" rectangle (the size of smaller greeting cards) on a piece of Strathmore Mixed Media paper.  I placed a circle the same size as the portraits, then began drawing my design.

Here's the way it looked after the first stage of painting.

I decided to use watercolor because the portraits are watercolor, pencil, and ink.  The watercolor will complement the portraits but will be secondary to them because of the ink on the portraits.

I began with very light washes of color over the whole piece, except painted around the owl, moon, bird, and rabbits.  Then I deepened the background color, painting around the leaves in the upper right and lower left.  Painting around little things like this is a pain, but masking would be impossible working this small.  So I just kept at it.