I love to watercolor. Years ago one of my biggest hobbies was illustrating and watercoloring images for a children's book that I was writing. I just love the transparency of color when mixed with water. Something about picking up a paint brush and adding color with it to an image makes me feel like a fine artist.
You might remember the canvas I did for BasicGrey featuring their Curio collection that included a vintage photo album page like the one above. I have been wanting to re-create that project for myself and sat down this morning and started on it. The first step is to add color to image printed on the frame. For this project, I used Tim Holtz Distress Re-inkers. The palette of muted colors is perfect for a vintage canvas like this one.
I like to put my inks in some type of container that will let me work with multiple colors at a time and keep them separate. I love the packaging from Tim's Muse Tokens. They have individual wells that can each hold a dropper full of color. Unless you are painting something huge though, you really don't need a full dropper of color, just a dot will do. I use a Sharpie to write on the name of the color on the plastic.
The packaging also has an attached lid that will snap closed and keep your inks from drying out. A word of caution though, this doesn't work for travel, the individual wells are not closed off enough that they won't move out of their space, especially if they are really full. But, if you are just going to keep it in your work space and are careful not to tip it too much, then you are fine. Okay, and then the other note of caution. Open carefully. The packaging closes tightly so if you go to open it and aren't paying attention you will get a bit of jiggling and splashing of color. Again though, if you don't over fill like I did above, you should be okay. So to summarize, re-using the packaging is awesome, overfilling and tilting, and opening without paying attention, not awesome. (LOL!)
So anyway, what I do is dip my brush in the color and dab it onto my craft sheet. I add a spray of water from my Mini Mister to mix in as needed. You can use the re-inker straight, but adding water will change the intensity of the color and make it a little more transparent.
Then, simply brush on your color. I like to keep my brush fairly dry with only small amounts of water/color loaded onto it so that I don't get any puddling on the project from too much liquid being transferred. I think in fine detail areas this is especially important. For me it is better to re-apply many times and build than to get too much and have to figure out how to re-move or cover an oops of too much.
In the image above, I colored the shape on the left with Wild Honey mixed with water. Below it, the border around the sunburst is Wild Honey straight with no water. In the image below, the stripes in the sunburst are both colored with Tumbled Glass. The darker stripes are straight re-inker, the paler ones are re-inker plus water.
I love that one re-inker color can give the look of two very different shades with just the addition of a tiny drop of water.
Okay, back to work! My morning play time is over. I need to dive in deep to photographing and writing the Vintage Glimmer Tag Book class. The deadline I sat for myself to have that ready to go live is quickly approaching!
