Colouring Class

Jess asked in comments:

Jessica said...I love it! Your colouring looks great :D So do you prefer the Aqua painter over the Blender Pen?

So I thought I'd do an entry on watercolouring, sort of. :0) When I started getting addicted to Stampin' Up (I was actually not a fan of stamps hah! in the beginning) I loved all the stamped images that people watercoloured. I wanted to be able to do the same thing so started searching crafty blogs to see just exactly how they did it. What I learned most people used was one of the following:

- Aqua Painter + SU Markers
- Aqua Painter + Watercolour Wonder crayons
- Aqua Painter + Watercolour pencils

Or for those willing to pay a little extra - Copics! I looked into copics and found them well out of my budget (because I could not be content with just buying one or two at a time, I'd need all the most used colours! all at once) and not worth the investment for something I felt I was not going to use on a daily basis.

So then I started scouring the internet for every Tutorial I could find. One of the better ones I found was over on Julie's Blog - No Copics? No Problem!! Of course seeing how easy it was to do did not necessarily mean putting it into practice would be easy! And of course everyone has their way of doing certain things, which may not necessarily work for you.

When I became a demo I bought the complete set of SU Markers (I tried cheaper ones from Michael's as well as Marvy's and they just did not work well IMO.) and the watercolour wonder crayons. I would say I definitely use the Markers + Aqua painter the most. I also have the blender pens but I just find I can move the ink around on the paper better with the AP. I pretty much use my AP for any colouring. The few times I've used my blender pen is when I want to colour with an In Colour ink on non-watercolour paper, which of course SU does not sell as markers.

What I've also learned is that it takes patience. Something I can be lacking in at times. I was ready to actually give up having my images look like the ones I see on other people's blogs, but after practicing a lot and developing little things that worked for me, I think I've finally started to be able to watercolour. :0)

Key things that worked well for me:

- Make sure you use a very heavy weight watercolour paper, the 90lb stuff does not cut it
- Wipe your AP off a lot as you are moving around the colour or removing colour. Some use their jeans, some their fingers or paper towel. I prefer paper towel. :0)
- Keep your AP that happy medium between not too dry but not too wet. Too wet of a brush is going to cause "splotches/fuzzy" spots on your paper. I learned this rather quickly. Once you fuzzball your paper you pretty much need to start over. You've "torn"away the paper and there is no way (that I've found anyway)that can fix it.