Distress Ink Watercolor: Practice

Ok bloggers...

I am absolutely even more in love with my Tim Holtz Distress Inks...now that I've invested in a Zig Brush2O!

Because the Distress Inks are specially formulated to react with water, they make for amazing water colors, especially for coloring in stamps! Simply press your ink pad onto a non stick surface, such as your craft sheet or an acrylic block, and use the water brush to pick up small amounts at a time. To clean of the brush after each color, simply swirl it around on your non stick surface or on a scratch piece of paper until its clear again! So easy!

Here's what I did...

This was my first attempt. I was using super cheap plain white paper and it warped like crazy due to all of the moisture. I couldn't believe how well I could detail with the water brush and Distress Inks. Notice the shading under the car - that was done by adding a small amount of Walnut Stain on top of the Tea Dye base. I also layered different blue Distress Inks to create the sky. This stamp is from Artistic Outpost.

This was the same thing. Just practice on regular ol' paper. I wanted to try my hand at coloring her hair and dress. I love the softness to this one, but I might give it another go :)

Today, I bought a package of watercolor paper after work, and cut a few pieces to 2.5"x3.5" (which is the correct size for ATCs). This particular image was actually a mistake. I was stamping...playing around, and really didn't like what I came up with, but I didn't want to waste my new paper, so I colored it in anyway. I at least like how the sky came out :) The water color paper is SO much better than regular cardstock, and didn't warp at all. It help the color better, and really helped the inks act more like watercolors!

This...this is my absolute favorite image so far. The stamp is, of course, a Tim Holtz stamp. Again, I used the water color ATCs that I cut, and was super pleased with the results! I was able to blend three different colors on tree alone, as well as color in the itty bitty leaves. To make the image pop a little more, I went over the lines (very carefully and painstakingly) with black Zig Millennium Markers in size 01 and 05.

Let me know what you think. I'm super excited about this!