Ink Stains: 2016 Watercolor Calendar

Today I have the second installment in our 2016 Watercolor calendar to share with you. Today I wanted to show you a bit about blending and how the power of plain old water can change the look of your painted image.

This is my finished calendar page...now let's see how it was made.

The great thing about watercolor is it goes where you tell it so if you wet a small area it will stay in that area until you either add too much water to fit in that area or you expand the area. So I started off by making a small rectangle on the watercolor paper with water.

Then I added a bit of color.

I continued to add 3 more water rectangles and color for each.

You'll notice how the two edges touched between the two colors when they were wet - see how the second color which had more water feathers out into the first color that was still damp.

So then I blended the seams between each color.

I then added a second layer of paint for a more intense color of each...

To blend the colors I used a brush filled with clean water and went back and forth from top to bottom. You can see how lovely the colors blended together.

More water play - lightening the dark colors by adding more water.

Then blending all of the colors together again.

And if you noticed in some of the photos plain water can also remove small mistakes. Even though the paint had been dried several times with a heat tool, by dabbing on water then wiping it with a clean cloth the little streak of paint has been removed!

For my calendar page I actually tore a bit of painters tape to get a rough edge and taped the watercolor paper down to my craft mat.

Next I began adding the 4 colors of red paint one at a time just as I did in the example above.

Once all 4 colors had been applied I blended the lines between each color.

But then I had a thought - it would be fun to show you the wicking powder of clean water so I began drawing lines between each color using plain water.