Remember when I shared a while back about using the Craftsy printable on drawing faces? How helpful it was?

Well, we’ve been using another one of their free e-guides recently to create mixed media flowers.

Creating Flowers in Mixed Media

The 5 botanical illustration tutorials included are ::

1. How to Draw a Flower in 4 Simple Steps by Antonella Avogadro
2. Build a Beautiful Bouquet with Watercolor and Colored Pencils by Antonella Avogadro
3. Illustrating Flowers with Pen, Ink and Watercolor by Jessie Oleson Moore
4. Painting Water Lilies in Mixed Media by Sandrine Pelissier
5. Experimenting with Paper Collage and Acrylic Paint by Sara Barnes

We skipped over the first two, not because we weren’t interested in depicting realistic flowers, but because the images were too light to see well on our print out (I imagine they show up better on the screen so we might try again later using the iPad).

But this time we tried a couple of techniques for creating mixed media flowers that involved combining pen and ink with watercolor paints.

And love how they turned out!

So much so that we are considering using them for our holiday card this year—either instead of a family photo or together with our family photo.

Since the artwork has been created and the photo hasn’t yet, I’m guessing we might just have this printed on our holiday cards. Or? I’m trying to think of a creative way to combine the two… Any ideas?

By the way, the kids, including our friend Roxy (above) drew and painted flowers and flower trees but also used the same pen and paint techniques to paint other things such as Christmas trees, spiders, and spider webs.

There’s one more tutorial in this e-guide / printable that we haven’t tried yet but would really like to and that’s the one on creating mixed media flowers with acrylic paint over a paper flower collage. Sounds fun and something we haven’t experimented with before. We’ll definitely have to give it a try soon!

If you’d like some ideas for creating flower art or just want some fun mixed media techniques that would work well with any subject, download this e-guide. It’s FREE!

Click here to download your free copy of Creating Flowers in Mixed Media

This is a 24-page guide, valued at $4.99, that you can download and print (or read on a computer / tablet if you prefer).

You may be asked to register with Craftsy which you can do with your name and email address or through Facebook.

They also have some classes on drawing and painting flowers that look worth taking ::

• Vivid flowers in colored pencil (this is the one I want to take!)
• Watercolor flower bouquet
• Luminous flowers in acrylic
• Color in bloom :: painting flowers in oil

This post was sponsored by Craftsy; all opinions expressed are my own.