Tutorial: Using Watercolor Pencils

Happy Wednesday!

My friends always ask me how to use watercolor pencils to color in stamped images. I thought that would be a good subject for a blog tutorial. Please excuse my messy craft table in the photos. I swear, I do not think it's possible for me to craft without it looking like a tornado hit a paper factory.

Supplies needed:

• Watercolored pencils: I'd recommend not getting the cheapest possible. You usually get what you pay for with these pencils. I'd tried the cheapos and they just don't blend well.
• A blender pen/water pen. DO NOT get one from Michaels. I did that when I first started and it did not work. It caused me more frustration than anything. UGH. Figured I'd save you guys some grief
• Stamped images of your choice. In the example, I'm using a retired stamp from Stampin up that I'm forgetting the name of right now.

Step 1: start by stamping your image with a dark or black ink. Take your selected watercolored pencils, in this case, I am using black and red (to get grey and pink). Using a light and small circular motion, shade just around the edges, sides of your image, like I did in the example above. Remember, that you're going to want certain areas a little darker, like under his arms, his chin, etc. Basically, where light wouldn't hit him as well. Click on the photo for a larger image. Try not to leave a lot of "gaps" in the color on these edges.

Step 2: take  your blender pen and start on the outside edges and  gently go over what you just colored, shading as you go in that same small circular motion for the last step. You don't need to press hard. Use a piece of scrap paper to sort of "wipe" your pen between colors, as if you were painting. If you're like me in the example above, you'll have too much white. No worries, onto step 3

Step 3: Take your pens and softly color in where you think there's too much white space.  Go ahead and get your blender pen and blend the color you just put down like we did earlier. In the interest of full disclosure, I'm not totally happy with my shading on this little elephant, but I need to purchase a new blender pen. A new pen would have let the shading flow a bit better I've had this one for a long time. I've just been putting it off. I'll be the Queen of Procrastination.. tomorrow.

I went ahead and started adding in the other colors here

I took the pink/purpley color from my box of watercolor pencils and shaded all around the image to give it some "pop". I also used the blender pen on the other colors. I actually liked the way the balloon turned out better than the elephant itself.

After using the blender pen on the pink "surrounding color and adding a little shading to a few edges here and there, our little elephant is all done. Did this tutorial help you? I love watercolor pencils. If you haven't used them yet, I'd recommend it. They're much more cost effective than Copics (although I hope to own some of those someday too) and gives more blending options than regular colored pencils. I've heard that you can use blender pens on colored pencils but I have NEVER gotten that to work for me. Share your watercolor pencil projects or comments!