Watercolour Pencils

Happy New Year! Thank you for reading my blog and I hope you will continue to join me here. All your comments are very much appreciated.

A very exciting development in the New Year is the arrival of Stampin' Up's new Watercolour pencils as a fabulous new colouring medium. At the moment there is a fairly limited palette of thirteen SU colours, but hopefully more will be introduced as time goes on. You can find them in the new Occasions catalogue which goes live on 4th January.

Having had a play with them over Christmas I am hooked! You can use them as colouring pencils or you can then create watercolour effects by going over your colouring with a Blender Pen or Aqua Painter. I tried with both, but my personal preference was the Aqua Painter. I initially worried that the Aqua Painter would be less controlled and envisaged too much water where I didn't want it, but it actually worked brilliantly.

I started off by colouring the gorgeous paper that is FREE during Saleabration with any order of £45. For the colourful version I used a mixture of Calypso Coral and Melon Mambo for the flowers (the pencils blend very easily) and Old Olive for the larger leaves. There is only one green available at the moment, so I first coloured the smaller leaves in Daffodil Delight and then went over them again with Bermuda Bay. I worked in small areas, colouring and then using the Aqua Painter. Of course the beauty of these new pencils is that you can add colour to your stamped images and I have a lot I want to try!

The second, more muted card uses the same paper but a more limited palette of just Early Expresso and Basic Grey. I also added some Wink of Stella to add a bit of glitter to the stamens.

You absolutely do not have to be some hot shot colourist to get amazing effects with these pencils. You can actually be very 'scribbly' and the Aqua Painter takes it all in its stride! I'm sure I'll be posting lots of coloured cards this year!

Finally here is a link to a great video from Shannon West where she shows you this great new product in action. These super pencils will be available from my website from the 4th January.

Happy colouring! April x