Happy winter afternoon stampers. With the weather we are having today it is hard to know what season it is. Only in Canada!! Started in the middle of the night with blowing snow, then a bit of freezing rain around lunch time and now it is just raining with big fat drops trailing down my stamp room window. If you just listened and didn’t look you would think it was spring. A perfect day for stamping and for using the new watercolour pencils.

Today I am going to show you how to use watercolour pencils. To really let them shine you have to leave room for blending. Do not give in to the temptation to colour in your entire image. Instead, just highlight a few areas and then use a blender pen to blend the colour and make it look like you painted it. It really is amazing the way these seemingly dry boring pencils come to life with the touch of a blender pen. Our whisper white card stock is perfect for colouring on. Be sure to use archival black ink to stamp your images as it will not cause the ink to bleed. For my card I used only rich razzleberry and old olive to do my colouring. The collage stamping was done in rich razzleberry, old olive and crumb cake. The set I used is Touches of Texture (141934, wood, $59.00 or 143251, clear mount, $44.00) This would be a great set to get as one of your bonus free sets in the starter kit!! If you would like to join my team just click here.Here is a closer up picture of the card front with the set I used for the words.  I added some wink of stella to the centre of the flowers and to the dragonfly.Here is a better view of the wink of stella, not the same as in real life, but you get an idea. I love this product!!I also used Beautiful You to demonstrate how to best use watercolour pencils. Do NOT colour in the entire image. If you do that you may as well use regular pencil crayons. The idea is to just add a few bold strokes and then use the blender pen to spread the colour around. The finished result is fabulous and it is such a satisfying technique. Discover your inner artist!Rather than stamp the puddle image, I used the basic gray watercolour pencil to add some colour. If you look closely you can see a touch of razzleberry. I forgot to clean my blender pen from the Touches of Texture collage card!I am having a class on Wednesday January 25 at 10am and 7pm where you can make 20 cards. The cost of the class is $95 and includes the stamp set Beautiful You, watercolour pencils, a blender pen, an archival black ink pad, soft sky ink pad and Inside the Lines designer series paper. Here are some of the cards:Seeing is believing, so be sure to watch this video that shows you how to best use your watercolour pencils. I would love to hear how you make out, and if you do not have a demonstrator in Canada, I would love to be yours. You can order from me, or even better, join my team and get your very own discount!

Well, I hope you enjoyed this post on watercolouring. After you get a chance to play with this technique, pop me a line and let me know what your favourite stamp set is to use for this technique.

Hugs, Jackie