Dream-Catcher Painting

One of my New Year resolution was to post as often as possible. But its been almost 2 months since I posted anything...
Recently, I wasn't feeling well and didn't go to school for 2 days. And even though our exams are coming up, I just couldn't study. So, to kill time, I made this dream-catcher painting...

You will need:

• A canvas
• Some acrylic Paints (Red, orange, yellow, black, blue, purple, pink)
• Some paintbrushes
• Water
• A cloth (For drying/wiping you paintbrush clean)
• A pencil
• A compass
• Permanent Marker 
• Newspaper

Phew... that's a lot of things

Procedure:

1. Painting the background: For the background, we want that beautiful gradient. Spread your workstation with newspaper to make cleaning easy.                       

• First, paint your entire canvas with water (yes, water). The water will help the paint spread and blend much better. Don't put too much though, just a thin layer. If you put too much, the colours won't be opaque.
• Start on the right bottom corner and paint about 1/3 of it yellow. Then dip your paintbush in a bit of orange paint and blend it with the edge of the yellow paint.
• When blended, paint the middle with orange. Repeat the same step to blend the orange with red.
• If you want to go back to a lighter colour, wash the paintbrush proper, dry it and then blend. You do not want the orange or red in your yellow.

2. Drawing the dream catcher: 

• Using your compass, draw two concentric circles on the top left corner, with 0.5cm gap
• On the inner circle, mark 8 points on the circumference such than they are 45° apart (If your circle goes out of the canvas, you may be able to mark only 6 or less points)
• Then, draw a flower petal-like shape from the center to these points.
• Next, mark more points between the previous ones and again draw the petals
• Now, draw some wavy lines at the bottom.

3. Painting the dream catcher:

• Start by painting the ring black and then you can go on the outline the flower petal things. I wasn't able to paint them, so I used a permanent marker instead.
• Then outline the threads coming down.
• Now, for the feathers, dip the tip of your thin paintbrush in black paint, and then dip it in water. What we are trying to do is to lower the concentration of black paint so that we get a faint black colour. Paint a few stokes on the newspaper to see is you are happy and then start.
• Make short strokes to paint the feathers and do not over do it. Always paint from the stem and then bring it outwards.
• Then, paint another feather , at the base of the canvas.
• Using the purple, blue and pink paints, make a few dots on the thread holing the feathers, to resemble the beads. I used the back of my paintbrush to make these circles.                                 

If you like, you could write a quote on the right to fill up the space like:

• Dream without fear or
• Only an open heart can catch dreams...