Hand Painting Flowers & Fairies on Garden Rocks

Sometimes I like to use a stencil to start which can make things MUCH easier. It just gives you a guideline and you can paint from there.

To follow the stencil method:

1. Purchase a flower stencil of your choice at a store like Michael's or A.C. Moore, or even online. There are many to choose from.

2. Paint the whole rock black on all sides

3. Paint the bottom half in gold metallic acrylic paint to look like the shape of a basket.

4. Take your stencil and following the directions on the stencil video (below), stencil your flower design using white acrylic paint over the top black portion of the rock.

5. After the white paint dries, just color in the flowers and leaves (the leaves in this photo are already completed with the second step of adding green paint after the white dried) with Deco paint pens of your color choice or using acrylic paints from a little bottle with a stencil brush (again, using the stencil video below as a guideline).

6. Decorate the basket (you can use a basket stencil) with random lines using a brown Deco paint pen. Deco paint pens work so well to give you extra control and accuracy with lines.

7. And there you have it - you have just painted your rock and I bet it's gorgeous! Congratulations, I knew you could do it! 
 

Well, with a little imagination and a little inspiration (look at pictures from a seed catalog like Burpee), you can create just about anything. This is a picture of how my yellow roses turned out.

Yellow Roses mean: 

Joy, Gladness, Friendship, Delight, Promise of a new beginning, Welcome Back, Remember Me, and "I care"

Decoupage is a unique method you can also use in decorating and painting any rock.   It is the art of cutting out pictures and adhering them to another surface,  The art of decoupage takes a lot of patience.  I sometimes use decoupage in my art work to give it an extra real look and to give me a guideline to paint on.   I always paint and embellish any decoupage cut outs that I use both before and after cutting them out. 

To decoupage on a rock you will need paper prints to cut out.  One of the places I look for cutouts is Dover Publications.  They have what seems to be an endless choice of prints to choose from.

The books that I choose from are the flower series and come with a colorful picture of each flower and a CD so that the images can be printed in all different sizes just by following the instructions on the CD that comes with the book.  I am not sure if all of the books come with a CD, but if they do it will be indicated in the product description.

The method I use to download and print is a very easy one and a little less involved than the way they instruct you on the CD that comes with the book. So the process would be as follows:

1.  Insert CD into hard drive and wait for pictures to upload.

2.  Find the picture you want to print on the computer

3.  Right click on the picture you want

4.  Select "Copy"

5.  Open another window and bring up a blank Word Processing document.

6.  Click "Paste" into the word doc.

7.  The picture you selected should appear.  If you right click on the picture within the word doc itself you should be able to adjust the size of the picture.

I realize this is not the method they tell you to use, but it's less involved than the way the program they give you with the CD.  Of course you can learn their way if you want and it might be beneficial for you to do so, but my way is just a quick and simple way and, quite honestly, the only way I use.

Maggie Lee Flower Creations

Maggie Lee Flower Creations