 Hi there, it's Sandy and today I'm going to be making a mosaic watercolor and I'm not painting in paint. I'm painting in pieces of watercolors and that will hopefully make sense here shortly. I saw an artist on Instagram who takes her failed pottery pieces after they're glazed and fired and she breaks them down into little pieces she can make mosaics with and I just got thinking what a great way to use a failed piece of art to make a great piece of art and that's what I wanted to try here. I have taken a whole bunch of old watercolor paintings that are scraps of things. Some of them were unfinished works, things that are never going to be sold, I'm never going to do anything with them. They're just sitting here in a pile. A lot of them I end up using for painting on the back side of them and trying out new techniques, practicing things, brushwork, etc. and sometimes I turn them into a background for something. I've got a video here on using your watercolor pieces to make bookmarks, that kind of thing, just cutting strips of them that are beautiful. But here I thought I'm going to see what happens if I just chop them all up, like she did with her pottery pieces and see if I can make something. So I've taken a large piece of heavy heavy Bristol and put some double-stick tape on it. This is super sticky double-stick tape. I've learned a bunch of things about this, by the way. I should have cut my pieces maybe a little bit bigger so I had more options with them. Also should have not taken the paper off of the sticky back sooner than necessary because all of this was too much. I kept touching it with my hand and it lost its sticky and especially when I left it out overnight. I think dust came and hit it or something because it was even less sticky the next morning. So only peel off the parts that you're going to literally be working on, just a section at a time, because it will remain sticky longer for you. You also want to have your pieces sorted. I have mine sorted in that big butcher tray so I could find a dark gray versus a medium gray and you saw they were just a big mix of things. But having them by color helped. If you have failed paintings that have brighter colors, you'll have a brighter color selection. You could do a flower. I couldn't really do a flower with the colors that I had. They're very neutral types of colors. So I chose this elephant. I used really small pieces on the face and I would have loved to do the whole thing in small pieces because I like the look of that better. I could get more detail and define shapes better but then I got busy. Pressing deadlines and I knew I could not work on this for two weeks, which is really what it would take. It would take a couple weeks to get something like this done. Maybe in the future, I'll give myself some time to do something like that. But this was not going to was not going to fly. So I started using larger pieces, figuring maybe the detail in the center would carry the day since everything else was just like a big mushy background anyway. So you can kind of see me working on this here. I put it at an angle because my board was too big for my table. It was the only board big enough. So that was a little strange. But nonetheless, I am going to share an easier version of this that you could do if you have some failed paintings that you want to try something like this with. The process here is really good for puzzle makers. If you love to do puzzles, this is perfect because you're finding little pieces that fit into a particular shape or cutting them down to fit just right. So let's talk about making a simpler piece. This is basically the process that I went through except these are larger pieces than I did in my big butcher tray. So I did this afterwards so I could show you just a snippet of how you would do this. Just find some pieces, cut them into chunks. You can always cut them smaller because I was thinking if I cut them all small in the first place I wouldn't have to do all the cutting but you really have to do the cutting anyway to make everything fit. That's just the nature of mosaic work. But you can see the big tray versus with all the little pieces versus my pile of larger pieces over there on the right. And they're kind of generally sorted by colors. This is the Blick paper that I used and it says it's 100 pound. It feels a lot heavier than that. I was able to cut through the watercolor paper and not cut through the backing paper. So it was really nice to have a super heavy weight thing to do this on so I didn't have to have it on a mat or anything as well. But if you use thinner paper you'll have to do that. And this tape is B Creative Tape. It's double stick and it's super, super sticky. So for the most part everything you stick to it stays to it except when you're working on these watercolor pieces you can kind of peel them up-ish if you don't press down really hard. So to start with a card I've got it bigger than what I'm going to need for the card and I peeled off enough that I could work on the candle I wanted to put in the middle. Just used an exacter knife to slice off a little bit extra. And I started with a green piece. I didn't have any yellows in my bin so I started with a very pale green. You could also start with a white if you don't have any yellow and you want to make a candle and use the back side of it. I didn't think about that at the time and stuck it on in the center and then looked for a piece that I wanted to be the candle base. So again if you want a red candle base or a Christmas card and you don't have any red then use the back side of one as the shape and then when you're all done you can just add some paint to it because it's watercolor paper. So I was looking for a second piece so I could make more of a rectangle-ish for this. I didn't want a perfect rectangle but I found a piece that I could put on the bottom end and then just trim it off with the exacter knife. Bend it back and forth. A couple of cuts usually is enough to make that happen. Now for the rest of it I'm going to need to cover everything on here, excuse me, in order to cover up all that sticky. If you want to just glue a candle on then you're going to have to put adhesive on the back of your candle piece and if that's all you want to stick on. But if you want to do the full sheet then you'll need to start cutting pieces. So I started cutting strips and they weren't even strips. I wasn't worried about trying to make everything straight because it wouldn't have the feel of mosaic and you can change the angle on one end or the other and the rays go out upward or downward just a matter of what you're looking for. And then I wanted to put a piece in between so here's a couple different ways to do it. You can put the piece in, just lightly set it down and trim off the place where there's an, you know, so you can see the angle that you want to get and you can either cut that with a knife or peel it right back up. If you haven't pressed it down you can peel it right back up and trim it with your scissors so that fits. Then I turned it the other way and I'm going to use heavy pressure and a couple of cuts and just bending back and forth of the watercolor paper to make the second cut. And ba-da-boom, ba-da-bing. You do the same thing around the entire background of the card. Just put rays in different colors. And then for the top portion I used the light green and white and then I mixed in a little bit of blue as well in between. So there was a few pieces I had that were super pale blue. Now as you work with this process you'll start to figure out more easily what shapes to pick out. So sometimes I would go to my stash and I'd be able to grab one that was at just the right angle, just the right size triangle, that sort of thing. And it just takes practice after a while, but you can see the paper was cut big enough that now I could chop it down and then be able to add it onto a card pretty easily. The color of the flame needed to be a little more yellowish so I painted some yellow right over that pale green and even added a tiny bit of red in there so it made it more of a warm color that makes it stand out better on the card itself. And you could do the same thing with any of these pieces. If the piece you picked, the color didn't work, there's something that stands out that's not looking great. Just take some paint and go right over the front of it and you can repair something like that. So there's an idea for using some of your failed watercolor paintings. I'll link you to another video where I made some bookmarks out of watercolor paintings. So give you another idea for things that didn't work out so great. You could still make something beautiful out of them. Alright, thank you so much for visiting with me today. I will see you again soon. Take care. Bye-bye.