Cheating with Watercolors

The other day I was poking around on my phone and decided to play with the stylus my Note 9 comes with.   I rarely touch it.  When I do use it, I use it for a long period of time and the Note 9’s stylus only holds a charge for 20-30 minutes.  This can be aggravating when you’re using it to draw since you have to keep taking breaks to let it charge for a few minutes.  Nevertheless, I was thinking about Fall, so I doodled out a pumpkin.pumpkin doodle from my phone

Now, I had a doodle on my phone, a ton of watercolor palettes sitting within eyesight of the couch I was sitting on and a new Cricut upstairs.   After letting those 3 facts bounce around in my head for a minute, I came up with a plan and uploaded my sketch to Cricut.   After shoving some watercolor paper into the machine, it drew out my pumpkin for me.

cricut drawing out my doodle on watercolor paper

I have been collecting different watercolor products for years and still hadn’t touched any of them.  I seriously have about 20 different palettes and sets sitting untouched.  I always wanted to get into it but it just never seemed to happen and the collection just kept building every time I became interested again.

I filled a cup with water and grabbed a few brushes and started filling in my pumpkin.

turns out the cricut markers aren't waterproof

It didn’t take more than a few seconds to realize the markers that the Cricut uses aren’t waterproof and the black just bled everywhere.  I always buy waterproof art pens so it didn’t even occur to me to check them first.

Unfortunately, the machine doesn’t use any type of pencil  but the it does have a fabric marker.  So I grabbed that and had it draw my pumpkin again.

drawing with a waterproof marker over the fabric pen marks

The fabric marker is really thick and it probably wouldn’t work for anything other than a simple outline like my pumpkin.  However, fabric markers are water soluble and should disappear as I am washing over the lines with watercolor.

First, I grabbed one of my waterproof art markers and went over the lines by hand before dropping in some color.    The blue marker didn’t instantly disappear, but a little scrubbing with the watercolor brush and it did eventually erase.

It turned out OK, I think.  I wasn’t expecting to walk away with anything and I mostly wanted to play with my watercolor sets.  Still, I’m happy with the first attempt at working through this process.    I do need to work on saturating my colors a bit.  Every time I put down color I would come back to it dry and looking all washed out.

After this project, I did do some searching online and found other people giving tips on cramming other markers into the Cricut machine.  Next, I may have to try that and skip the fabric marker all together.

 

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