23 May A Beginner’s Guide to Brushwork, Lesson #25

Are you ready for brushwork lesson #25? Our homeschool handicraft project for today is from the book, Brushwork Elementary Brush-Forms by Marion Hudson, and is called A Design of Corn and Mice. This lesson is very similar to the previous brushwork lesson, which features several corn stalks and introduces a quick and simple method to paint mice. If you’re following along with us, you’ll want to make sure that you’ve complete Lesson #24, a Lesson on Corn and Mice first.

Our Grid Paper

Our grid paper and grid design has been our security blanket during this brushwork series, guiding us in size and perspective. Today, however, a in our previous lesson, we are going to wing it. No grid design for this lesson! Let’s see where our creativity will take us!

Materials Needed

• The book, Brushwork, Elementary Brush-Forms by Marion Hudson (also available online HERE)
• 1″ absorbent grid paper
• Watercolor paints (green and brown)
• Watercolor Paintbrush, we used a Princeton Velvetouch , round size 6 
• A glass of water (not used for drinking)
• A small plate for mixing paint and water
• A napkin to dry the brush

Happy Handicrafts Video: A Beginner’s Guide to Brushwork, Lesson #25

The Process

The directions for this lesson are going to be very similar to the previous brushwork lesson. We are going to use two paint colors – yellow and brown. I went back and forth between the two colors, so brush cleaning was occasionally needed.

First, we drew the thin lines at the top, Keeping the paint thinned out with water allows the paint to go on in a very thin line. -Along the top line, we added small mouse tails and feet, and along the bottom line we painted the little tufts of I-don’t-know-what. We then switched to the yellow paint, and began painting in our corn stalks.

After completing the corn stalks, we added the yellow curves onto the bottom brown line at the top, and underlined it with a yellow line. That design is now complete.

Next, we returned to the brown paint to add shading details to our corn (I’m still insisting that this is wheat!) and leaves. Keep the paint very diluted for this portion of the design, as you want to keep the shading subtle.

We are going to complete our design by painting in our little mice. Add a little extra brown paint for the mice to make them a little darker. Start with a simple brush form (or two together). Add the ears, front paws, tail and rear paws. Position some on the corn stalks, some on the grass, and some on the ground.

Come Join Us!

If you’re just finding us, you can get started with our first brushwork lesson and advance according to your skill. We store all of our videos on YouTube at Happy Handicrafts. You don’t have to start with brushwork – we have paper sloyd, needle-felting, crochet, and more. Go explore and choose which playlist will be the best for you and your family! We’ll see you there!