Chinese Lanterns: Watercolor and Colored Pencil

Underpainting? With Watercolor?

Yes! Watercolor is beautiful but it has one major drawback.

You can mix the most vibrant watercolor colors imaginable on your palette. Gorgeous, wet, and amazing color! But once they go onto the paper and dry, the color will fade.

It's the nature of the beast. Watercolor loses its potency as it dries.

But there are ways to keep your paintings from washing out and looking pale. It's called underpainting. We are going to try preserving vibrancy!

**Taught as a local class in 2016. Now available as a full page digital stamp**

Chinese Lanterns

Designed for Watercolor but perfect for Copic or colored pencil.

This full page digital image is an original stamp used in my H2Oh! watercoloring classes in 2016. It was designed as a full page stamp (8.5" x 11") but can be scaled down if desired.

"Chinese Lanterns" has wide open areas with no texture marks and is perfect for colored pencil, alcohol markers, watercolor... your options are endless!

Lettering is not included in the digital stamp as it was hand lettered by me after the project was compled.

This stamp was taught as a watercolor class, therefore I do not have a recipe guide to include in the stamp package. You can view my “Work in Progress” photos for this project on Instagram here.

Yes, I want Beans!

Royal Iris: a Copic and Colored Pencil Vanilla Arts Digi Stamp

Water control = color control

H2Oh! classes approach watercolor from a rather unique perspective.

I learned to watercolor first. And my watercolor mindset has greatly influenced the way I use and teach Copic marker classes.

H2Oh! flips that on its head. I teach my intermediate level coloring students to use their Copic skills with watercolor.

The two mediums are very similar. With one exception...

Water control.

In marker, if you want a lighter color, you switch to a lighter marker. In watercolor, you dilute your paint.

How much to dilute... now that's the hard part.

This month we're limiting our color palette in order to concentrate on the strength of our paint. Light green, dark green, light violet, dark violet. It's good practice to see how many colors we can get from just a few tubes of paint.

**Taught as a local class in 2016.**

Yes, I want Beans!