Begin with a sheet of watercolor paper. Wet your paintbrush, brush it over areas of the paper to get it wet. Avoid puddles. You can always add more water.

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Load your wet paintbrush with a color by dipping your brush onto one of the colors in the set and swirling it around. When you have loaded the color onto your brush, paint it onto the watercolor paper. You will see the color spread when it hits a wet area on the paper. For this project, you are simply going to spread colors randomly over the paper, allowing some to blend. You can also paint on the dry part of the paper for a more opaque color.

Tip: Rinse your brush between colors so that you don't get one color in your set dirty with another color. If you accidently do this, rinse your brush, then swirl it onto the contaminated color and try to remove it.

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Repeat adding colors to your paper. Add a little water to blend in areas, but be careful not to get the paper too wet.

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Let the paper dry (or speed up the drying with a hairdryer)

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Cut up the painting into shapes with straight edges (squares, rectangles and triangles). Vary the size of the shapes you cut so you have a good variety to choose from when making your mosaic.

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Cut a piece of black cardstock to desired size. 8"x8" is what we used. Glue the back of a shape and stick it onto the black cardstock, starting in a corner. Glue and add more pieces leaving space between each piece so the black paper shows. Line up straight edges parallel to one another. Repeat until you have covered the entire piece of black cardstock.

Tip: Make sure you have glued the entire back of each shape so it will adhere to the cardstock.

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Passport: Faux Mosaic Art

Instructions

ADDITIONAL MATERIALS