Tag Archives: Water coloring

A water-colored card (with Distress reinkers!)

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Stamps are of course great adornments on almost any background, but you can also go the other way around: start with a stamped image on a white background, then coloring it in yourself – Including the background.

I started with a nice image of a rustic window, its shutters open, some vines and flowers growing around it. I stamped with black archival ink on a piece of sturdy matte-coated paper I had laying around and didn’t know any properties of – but thought, oh well, we’ll see, this will probably work at least somewhat (and it did 🙂 ).

I then took out my Distress ink Reinkers, put a couple of drops of each color in a Tim Holtz Ink Palette, and went to work with a watercolor brush pen.

I colored the entire surface, paying special attention to the window panes (how does one color glass…?)

When the ink was sufficiently dry, I covered each window with Glossy Accents, to give them a nice ‘window-like’ reflection.

To finish it off I die-cut a sentiment (Congrats) from rose gold (almost copper) metallic paper and attached it to the lower right corner.

All in all it was a nice, meditatively calm kind of project. The reinkers worked wonderfully as watercolors, and the ink palette came in handy. But note that you can’t really travel with the ink palette because the ink drops will not remain in their pans – which to me was a disappointment.

Watercoloring with Distress

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Watercoloring is a great way if, like me, you’re not a particularly good colorist, mainly because it’s a relatively forgiving technique. Water will help you blend out colors and sharp lines, at least a bit. Of course there is much to learn here, but even as a beginner I felt confident enough about my first water colored cards to actually send them out to people.

In the second half of the video I’m showing you some technique, when I’m coloring one of the envelopes. I used several colors of Distress Ink (minis) and Distress Markers. It was simply what I had, hence the combination of inks and markers. Since these Distress products are all water-based and really work well together, it’s great to combine them and create the color palette that you’re looking for.

Watercoloring is a great technique if you’re out on the road: contrary to scrapbooking, it takes very little to take with you what you need, and to have some relaxing moments while you’re not at home. Just do the stamping at home, and color them on the road. So while this will probably not become my main hobby, it will definitely stay in my papercraft repertoire!