There’s nothing better than a Spanish summer spent in the Mediterranean coast! But now that summer is sadly over, I wanted to find a way to preserve my memories of these quaint, picturesque Spanish towns, and I wanted to mix some watercolours into it. So I came up with the idea of painting my own Mediterranean inspired, Andalusian-style tiles.
And since I’ve wanted to share my love for watercolours & teaching for a while, I thought of turning this into a workshop where others can come and paint their fruity Mediterranean tiles with me!
PS. if you’re wondering why I went for fruits, this is because they let us play around with vibrant colours, and they always make a great decorative addition for kitchens or beach houses. Just like the framed artsy tiles you can see above.
The process: from line art to watercolour paintings
In order to avoid having to draw all the fruit compositions from scratch (and to make our lives easier!), I have already created all the tiles as black-and-white line drawings (see an example below) that you can download and print yourself. You can then reverse-trace this onto watercolour paper so we can focus on the fun part: painting and letting the colours flow!
You can also see the sequence of steps I used to paint some peaches: it’s always best to paint separate objects that are NOT touching each other, to avoid any wet paint from mixing with the next shape.
This is why I first went for one peach, then for separate, non-touching leaves, and only once my first peach had dried up, I went in for the second one.
I was quite pleased with how my peach tile turned out. I added some ultramarine blue decorations and a border, and then had ChatGPT generate some mockups of how the tile would look like if framed (middle below) or if it was actually used as a real tile (right below)! Would you go for any of these options?
Printable templates
You can find the printable black-and-white templates in the PDFs below.
Simply download your preferred size (A4 or A5), print them out, and shade the back of the drawings with a pencil.
Then, place the templates on your watercolour paper and trace over your chosen design to transfer it. You will now be ready to start painting!
Painting suggestions
You can find some colour inspirations for your fruit designs below, in case you need a reference point to start with.
But remember that this is art, so you can always experiment with colours and personalise your designs (there’s no wrong answer!). So feel free to get creative and use whichever colours you like. Happy painting!! 🤗
