Watercolor has always been one of my favorite coloring techniques and my favorite "watercolors" to use are Tim Holtz Distress Inks, as evidenced by this article I wrote here in the CLASSroom back in 2009: Watercoloring with Distress Inks. << Please visit this link to see a different type of defined flower watercolor image than today's background watercolor project.
It's very easy to use either the ink pad or reinker -- here's how I normally use each of them (bold products are linked below in the supply section):
In the photo above, on the left is the full-sized Twisted Citron ink pad and I used the lid in which to place a few drops of Twisted Citron reinker. Then I used a waterbrush to pick up the ink from the lid. On the right in the photo above I simply tapped the Picked Raspberry Mini Ink Pad onto my Non-Stick Craft Sheet, then used the waterbrush to pick up the ink from the craft sheet.
To create this card, first I stamped this pretty new Wonderful sentiment from Julie's Holly Jolly stamp set onto a 4.25" x 5.50" piece of watercolor paper with Versamark ink. Next, I clear heat embossed it:
To color the background, I spread clean water fairly liberally along the bottom of the card, creating the area I wanted to paint first with the Twisted Citron ink. You want the paper to remain wet for the next step:
Next, I dipped my waterbrush into the Twisted Citron ink and placed the ink onto the wet area of the paper:
The color will begin wicking and migrating only where there is water! Keep adding ink until the space is filled with color:
Next, I dried the green area with my heat tool (or you could let it dry naturally), and repeated the process with each of my other colors, first adding clean water wherever I wanted the next area of color and drying each color before moving on to the next: Festive Berries in the middle, then Picked Raspberry on top:
To finish the card, I die cut Bazzill Licorice Twist cardstock with Taylored Expressions Picture Perfect-Vertical die and glued it to the watercolored panel. The panel was attached to a Neenah 110 lb. Solar White card base.
I love the versatility of Distress Inks and hope you will give them a try as your watercoloring medium, too!
