Crafts by Carolyn - Stamping - using watercolour pencils

Introduction to Rubber Stamping - using watercolour pencils (part 2)
Once you have mastered the art of stamping there are loads of different places that have advanced techniques, I love to view the Hero Arts blog and they often have videos. Tweet The stamping section on the forum has lots of advice on techniques: rubber stamping forum
Following on from the previous page water colour pencils I shall now introduce some water! Watercolour pencils So just a reminder here are some of my pencils. The ones that are really dark blue are from the Inktense range and are different to use, as these give out loads of colour and can be quite bold. As promised we are now breaking out into using water, I fnd it best to use minimum amount of water to start off, and it is advisable to have some paper towel on standby to dry your brush.
I only coloured the edges of the barrel, and dragged the colour into the centre.		I have found that plastic cups are easy to knock over...and find the little tiny glass jars that you get jam in are nice and steady and squat and perfect for your brush, and you really won't need much water. When using the pencils I only use one jar. Using the pencils The techniques that you have learnt by using them dry can be the same and you can just wet them - you will see that they produce a different effect just by adding water. So let's start: stamp your image in either a waterproof ink such as Ranger archival, there are lots out there just read the instructions on the pad. Or emboss your image - this really keeps any wet paint within the image, and so easy to keep within the lines, see here for some ideas. Work with clean scrap paper under your work area Jar of clean water Paper towel Paint brush Select your pencils Start colouring - you can start by shading the areas that you want the darkest, and depending how dark you want the rest of the image you may not need to colour the rest of the image. So a simple way to start is to colour the outer edgesonly, you can always add more colour - but it is harder to take it away. You really don't need to be that perfect as the water will 'wash' the pencil strokes away. You just need to make sure that you keep within the lines.
Wet your brush - you really won't need much, now put the wet brush onto your colour and drag the colour into the image. It should be dark in the areas that you 'coloured' and lighter where you move your brush. You can put a wet paintbrush directly onto the pencil to get colour onto your brush, this can be useful to get a more intense colour, watch when the pencil is wet if you use it to colour -it will behave differently - but it soon dries!. This video using Inktense pencils illustrates all the ways you can use watercolour pencils, the Inktense ones re more bolder, but the techniques are the same.
	You really don't need much colour to get a lovely effect, this one has only a little - but looks cute.
	<-- You can see that I just coloured certain areas and then brushed the colour in. The centres of the flowers are much darker -->
Using watercolour Move next instalment will be watercolours and sparkly watercolours.