Working It Wednesday: Watercolor Pencils

This week I played around with watercolor pencils for the first time. Until recently, I'd never even heard of them and had no idea such a thing existed. They're kinda cool in that you can use them dry just like regular colored pencils or you can wet them and they turn into watercolor paint. There are different ways to get the wet effect. You can dip the pencil tip directly into the water and then color on the paper or you can color dry on the paper and then brush water over the paper. I tried the second, using a paintbrush to spread water over the paper.

Here's a step by step of what I did:

I started by sketching out my picture. I used watercolor paper and dry watercolor pencils. The pencils genuinely feel like plain old regular colored pencils when you use them dry.

Once my feather was sketched out, I added a short quote.

Then came the fun part! I took a clean watercolor paintbrush and carefully brushed water over the paper. You have to be extra careful on this step because using too much water will smear all your colors together. Sometimes this could create a nice effect but in this particular case, I didn't want all my feather colors blending together so I tried to use my water sparingly. On the short quote part I used the water a little more liberally and you can see in the picture below how the color spread nicely across the paper. 

As a final touch I took an extra fine sharpie pen and went over the lettering and the stem of the feather to make the detail pop a little more. Here is how the finished project turned out:

All said, I liked how the lettering turned out with both the pencils and the sharpie. I think this would be a great technique for me to make some greeting cards with. I will need more practice playing around with the pencils and water on the multi-colored pictures. Not over watering the colors and blending them together definetly takes practice. In the meantime, I may take a few quotes and paint them/color them onto blank greeting cards and list them in my Etsy shop. You can watch for them to appear in the shop here: www.wishesandwonderment.etsy.com