Rubber Stamping and Watercolor Pencils

Kids love to paint, so this project will show how to use watercolor pencils with your rubber stamping projects.

You can purchase at any craft store, watercolor pencils. They look just like colored pencils, but are water-soluble so once water is added to the colored area it acts like watercolor paint. In this project I used Prismacolor Watercolor pencils. You can use a paint brush to blend the colors, here I used a water brush.

Before you do your final project and if you have never worked with watercolor pencils, do some testing first. Practice mixing colors to get a different look, and try it on different types of paper to see what works best. I used white card stock in my project.

In this example I used this "funky" looking frog from our Bigfoot & Pickle Face Creations, Fun with Fish collection. He is quite odd looking but still cute.

I stamped the image with our child safe/washable ink stamp pad in black. Then I took the watercolor pencils and outlined in the areas where I wanted each color to show up. With colored pencils you would just color the whole area, but with watercolor pencils you can just give the area a bit of the color you want and then use water to blend it together to give it a water color look.

On the far left bottom picture I started to blend the colors together with my water brush [or paint brush]. The last picture is the finished product. I added two different colors of blue to give it a water look. Add additional coloring where needed to complete your project. I colored in the eyes with a marker to have that stand out.

Have fun when rubber stamping and use different types of techniques to give it a fun look. I would love to hear from you, I welcome comments. Come see my website or visit my store to purchase this cool stamp. Happy Stamping!

If you don't want to purchase water color pencils, Kate Pullen, at about.com has an article on "Blending Pencil Colors with Mineral Spirits". Water color pencils will work best when working with young kids.