How To Paint An Artful Watercolor Strawberry

Friends, this painted watercolor strawberry tutorial is from way back in 2015, but since I just used the strawberries for the last time (since I wrote my son's name and age on them) 7 years later and they still look great, I thought I'd revisit this fun craft. Make a bushel of strawberries, cut them out and use them as garlands or cake or cupcake toppers, gift tags, you name it! And best of all, they keep really well, you know in that box of little pieces of art that you can use in a pinch for party decor! Here is the text from the original post:

Isn't this watercolor strawberry portrait just the greatest? While I though at the time that she wasn't really putting her mind to this little painting session, in the end her unstudied strawberry turned out to be the best of all. Isn't it great when your kids out-do you?

You'll Need:

• watercolor paper
• watercolors, palette or tubes
• a pencil
• kosher salt

How To:

1. Lightly draw the outline of the fruit you'd like to paint with a pencil. Alternately, give this a try with some circles or squares, which could look great too!
2. Wet your brush, and then apply small amounts of different colored paint to the shape. If your fruit is very large, you can wet the paper in the middle, but otherwise, wetting the paper before applying color results in too much bleed for a project like this with defined edges.
3. Sprinkle kosher salt over the wet areas of the painting. The salt picks up colors and leaves little dots which look amazing and give the painting texture.
4. Paint the stem or leaves.
5. Set aside to dry.
6. Only when totally dry, shake off kosher salt and enjoy!

Note: Traditionally, water color paper is taped down to a surface with masking tape before starting to paint, this keeps the artwork from buckling.

We were inspired to paint these fruit after I saw a wonderful post over at grow creative.

Okay gotta run, and by the way, these photos were taken in manual in a spot on my front porch where I could never take photos in the afternoon when I didn't use the manual setting! Progress!