For the past year, I’ve been working on many large items for my upcoming art installation. The exhibit, Paper Works, will be held at the Mansion at Strathmore in Bethesda, Maryland, Sept. 8 through Oct. 31. For the show, I am working on the largest piece I have ever done. There are lots of furry critters, birds and all sorts of surprises within the exhibit.

One of the pieces I am making is a large wreath for the front door of my “Charming Victorian Country Garden Retreat.” It is going to be a grapevine wreath with a variety of pretty flowers and leaves and a beautiful bow — all made out of paper. I am making all the pieces separately before I start attaching them to the wreath.

Since I will need to make a lot of leaves, I wanted to mix up a large amount of watercolor paints at one time. The only paint trays I had were these small watercolor trays with individual cups with lids. I really like these trays, but since I need a lot of paint, someone suggested I could try canning jars.

I used the jars a few months ago to mix up the paints I needed for my paper sculpture dog, Rusty, and it really worked out well. The other nice thing about using canning jars is that it is so easy to mix paints. I add various colors to the jars, put the lid on tightly, and give it a good shake. Open it up and test the out the color and decide whether it’s good to go or it needs another mix.

I use watercolor and gouache paints, so it takes more paint than I am used to using for my smaller paper sculptures — and big brushes too! It was fun mixing up the colors and slathering watery paints onto large sheets of papers.

To show you the final product, here are some of the leaves I’ve been painting up in my studio. Hopefully I will have enough leaves already, but if not, I can easily make more. I still have paint left over to make sure they will be the same shades of greens.