Watercolour and Calligraphy Place Cards

Hi and welcome to a really special episode because today I'm taking you behind the scenes into my watercolour wedding stationery business. We're going to be doing some lovely decorative floral place cards. You've been learning some simple smaller flowers and these are perfect to put a really beautiful little border on some place cards. Now these could be used for weddings but of course for any event or even if you're just trying to zhuzh up your table for dinner each night. So get your paints and let's get started. The desk looks a little bit different today doesn't it? There's a lot of other kit. We will be getting the watercolours in in a minute but first off we need to talk through how we're going to make these place cards. Don't be intimidated by all the stuff it's just I want to show you some of the options. So we'll move some things out the way and we will first have a look at the paper itself. So I like to use a lovely piece of natural handmade paper which is called kadi paper k-h-a-d-i and it's got a similar texture to watercolour paper. This is some simple normal cold press watercolour paper just so you can see but from the side you'll be able to see there's already quite a wave in that paper whereas watercolour paper is already nice and smooth. Now the place cards we're going to make today are going to have this lovely raw edge and that is what kadi paper is well known for. However I do want to show you that it is possible to achieve a good tear on watercolour paper but it's always much easier to do it on the kadi. I have two rulers here this is just a regular metal edge ruler it's got a metallic bottom and it just means it sort of sits up off the page but this is a Westcott special deckle edge ruler which I bought when I was first starting out thinking it would be handy but I've actually found that I prefer to use the metal edge but I thought we would have a go at both so you can see. So on this Westcott ruler you'll see we've got this really jaggedy sort of mountain range edge and on this side a slightly smaller but still quite rough edge and the whole point of this ruler is so you can place it down and tear regular paper to get these rough edges that we sort of want to achieve from here so let's have a go. I've got a spare piece of watercolour paper here because this is the bit I want to keep nice and let's just see what happens. So if I use the smaller edge I just want to keep it pressed down and just tear away scrap paper so from doing that oh it's quite exhausting we do get a rough edge it's it's not bad it's quite good I think always I'm just always referring back to this and looking how lovely and natural that is. Okay let's have a go this time at pulling away with the larger edge so we can compare. So I always also struggle to just get my hands in the right place for this one so with watercolour paper it's quite hard until you get into a rhythm and of course this happens to the paper if you are wanting to use this bit it's a bit ruined really but you see that edge is really really rough and jaggedy. So this ruler is good for a thinner paper but when you're trying to use actual watercolour paper I find it a little bit tough to use. However if I'm just tearing with my ruler a straight ruler I find that I still get whoops a really nice rough edge because I'm still tearing and I find that edge just a little bit more authentic than the deckle edge ruler so if I'm using watercolour paper I will still actually use my straight ruler rather than one of these but as I said this is kind of fun if you're using a thinner paper but we need watercolour paper or at least the cardi paper for this so I'm going to put this one side for a moment and opt for this. Okay so we can remove those out the way and let's go back to our bits of paper so when I make a place card I like to have it as a roughly sort of three to four centimetres thick so I find to be honest if I just lay the ruler down and give it a little bit of leeway on that side that is usually a really good amount of space for a place card because then you've got enough room to write someone's name in a nice big bit of calligraphy and enough room to put a nice little bit of decorative floral detail so let's just rip up another one of these so a bit of space and this is a cotton rag paper so you can see that there's just this little bit of almost like seams or something coming through it but it's just lovely so I really love this paper if we did it with this we're gonna come because we're gonna contrast and compare I need to rip both edges of this bit of watercolour paper so that'll do like that whoops bits paper flying everywhere so we also could do with ripping off the edges there and there but we can do that shortly but this is our sort of two comparative pieces now the next thing that I like to do is to place a little hole and an eyelet in the place card for then we're able to put a little bit of ribbon through and make a lovely little sort of tag for this place card some people like to use their place cards to sort of tie on to little favours and things so this is a cropper dial yes you heard that right a cropper dial and it's great because it's a dual purpose thing firstly it can punch a hole in the place card so I'm just going to punch the hole like that now the cool thing is it has a setting here which you can move up and down to allow for how much space you want on the edge for the hole to be so I like that amount of room so we've got our little holes but the next thing is it can also add in an eyelet I buy these on Amazon they are readily available in a number of craft stores but essentially I just use the single eyelet it's sort of it's funny that all sort of chimney pot shape here and what I tend to do is I stick it in there and then on your hole punch here it will have a handy little a sort of illustration on the side showing you which way to put your eyelet in and then you just want to squeeze it and out comes a beautifully punched eyelet so let's just do it on this one as so check the illustration on the side and it works really nicely on both the watercolor paper and the cardi paper okay the next stage is to do some watercolor so I'm just going to clear this up and we'll get painting here we are in the slightly more familiar setting I've got some really nice blue silk ribbon to go with these place cards and I've got silver eyelets so I want to think of flowers that are going to complement the blue and the silver so I've turned my palette round so we've got all the blue tones here I think we'll just go for a nice range of different blues and I'm going to paint some lovely little flowers now because I'm painting things in blue it's not going to mean that everything is completely sort of 100 accurate in terms of color so I could paint like a blue daisy couldn't I just I like the idea of things just all following that nice blue tone but I'm not so worried about being completely anatomically accurate now the other thing is I've got a lot of blues in my palette but I want to make sure that they complement the blue of my ribbon so let's have a look here I think that blue could be quite good maybe knocked back a little bit okay so it's always good to have your color reference in there so you can see it so we might get a slightly gray gray blue that's that's quite a nice color okay so that's going to be my main color so let's start off with the watercolor paper first so I'm going to use my 2.0 of my two tenths brush and I'm going to have I think I'm going to have a name there and then I'd like the idea of putting in a little sort of border of flowers here so what shall I go for I think I'm going to start with a little rose so we're working really small here and of course I'm not not particularly sure if blue roses exist but again this is a sort of themed place card for a a wedding or an event could be the frozen premiere after party couldn't it with all these lovely little colors in so I've got a nice rose there I think I'll also pop in just a fraction of darkness in there as well and I'm gonna have some little leaves coming off the side just constantly mixing up a bit more so you know this place card tutorial is really could work for any kind of themed event you might have but it's just so lovely to be able to come up with something that's a little bit more personal at the moment as I paint this we are in the UK just starting to allow small-scale weddings again from coming out of Covid and things and so it means that I am being asked to do a lot more sort of detailed little hand-painted things that maybe are a little bit more detailed and time-consuming as opposed to if I was working on a wedding that had hundreds and hundreds of place cards and things where you probably wouldn't be able to hand paint every single one so it's quite a nice sort of fallout of what's been a very sort of distressing and disruptive time that maybe it might give people a chance to think about doing things a little bit differently okay so we've got a lovely rose and to be honest I don't think we need a huge amount more I might just sort of do a quick little sort of doodle flower and this is a miniature version of a flower that was in my easiest watercolour flowers ever tutorial so I'd highly recommend going and having a look at that so just playing around along the border there just creating some really nice little flowers little details putting in some extra little things there so that's quite a nice little sort of edge of pattern there and then we're going to have a nice name and a bit of blue silk ribbon so that was just using a range of blues and I'm just popping in the tiniest bit of mars black just to give it a bit more depth and interest so that is one way of sort of making a lovely colour palette from a silver and a blue ribbon piece and just using a smallish brush and just filling up the corner there and then if I use my cardi paper I'll keep that one in there for reference now the other way we could look at the blue colour palette is by thinking about complementary colours I'm just going to get my colour wheel one moment this is a colour wheel and on it we can see the spectrum of colour and we've got blue over here and if you look across the colour wheel to the opposite side you will find what we call a complementary colour a colour that on one hand is completely at odds with it but can also work as a fantastic colour palette companion so I'm going to have a look at creating a nice bit of colour using some warmer shades alongside the blue so I'm going to get the ochre out this reminds me of a kind of slightly retro Orla Keighley or Orla Kylie design vibe so we're going to have some ochre and we're going to have some orange and we're going to have some blue so I just want to give you another option it's kind of a fun colour palette I think I think it can always be a bit of a risk but this is what this is all about this is experimentation so this time I'm going to use my blue as the stems and the leaves there and then I'm going to use the orange and do a slightly more folk art style flower and it's a very different approach but I think it works just as well and then I will use my ochre down here and sort of reverse the pattern and give myself a lovely blue circle maybe do some dots around the edge now if you quite like the sort of folk art style but aren't really sure where to begin it's really worth having a look if your granny or anyone has any blue china plates I love Delftware that is the sort of name of this style of painting slightly sort of strange folky flowers that aren't necessarily completely sort of anatomically accurate but they've got a lot of character to them and they can be super fun and I'm just kind of making it up as I go along really aren't we all hey there we go and then we'll have something coming in the top well actually no let's have another one coming in from the bottom and let's have it slightly different there we go so a lot of my sort of watercolor tutorials are about having a bit of fun and messing about a little bit whilst learning a new skill as well so I really implore you to have some fun with this project idea it's not always about having a perfectly accurate sort of flower painting lovely and yes and I think I will just do a few little more of those little teardrop shapes I was popping in to pop a little pattern on the end there so now we've got two lovely little place card things we can pop a bit of ribbon on so I've just got a lovely raw edge silk ribbon I find there are so many places that you could pick up some ribbon like this I like to use some independent makers on Etsy I think that's really fantastic because there are loads of nice independent sellers and you want about 30 centimeters of ribbon per place card just to make sure you've got a lovely sort of furl of ribbon just so you've got enough it also means you could just trim it later on and I like to fold it in half then feed it through whoops a daisy come on in it goes feed it through find the loop and then go through the hole and voila you've got a beautiful little place card we'll pop this one on as well and then the last step of this is a bit of calligraphy now I am also a calligrapher as well as a watercolor artist I made the decision a few years ago to just focus on teaching watercolor and not teach calligraphy anymore just because there are so many wonderful calligraphy teachers out there that I thought there are plenty of people doing it better than me so what I've done is I've added in the episode notes a few people who I think are really fantastic calligraphers if you're interested in learning the next step that you can go and watch from who I think are fantastic okay so we've got our lovely place cards next is the naming so it's time to do some calligraphy now I use Higgins eternal black ink and I have a straight calligraphy pen holder and I use a nikko g nib all of these things will become very clear to you if you go and have a look at some of these calligraphers that I recommend so I'm going to use dip pen dip it in the ink and I'm just going to go for it I'm going to write oops now writing on watercolor paper has its challenges because it is a textured paper but the great thing is is it can handle the black ink really nicely and it does work as long as your nib is nice and new so that is a really beautifully done place card so we'll do another one here now the cardi paper is possibly even more textured than the watercolor paper and it does have a tendency to have little sort of wisps of the cotton that can get caught in the nib so that is one of the sort of slightly less good aspects of this paper whilst it is so super beautiful um right what should I write but I just think having a handwritten calligraphy name is just the perfect finishing touch to your place cards so I think in comparison both work really nicely it's much easier to get a true natural raw edge all the way around a piece of cardi paper that is naturally already got a deckle edge it's what we call it for this one in the end I decided to leave the end straight because I just thought it was kind of cool um the watercolor paper does tear quite nicely that was done with an actual straight ruler rather than worrying about forking out for a special deckle edged ruler I have just chosen to sort of fill up the end with some little detail this one a little bit more botanical this one a little bit more folky but I think both work really nicely thanks so much for watching there are so many variations of this place card project so we'll definitely be revisiting it with a new color scheme maybe some new ribbons and embellishments they'll be fun but for now it would be lovely to hear from you and how you're getting on you know I'm always on Instagram at de Winton Paper Co and you can send me pictures of your paintings and ask for advice and of course down below in the comments section you can get in touch there like the video if you've liked it and subscribe if you don't want to miss another one okay I'll see you again soon bye