liquid watercolors

I work a lot with watercolors and I've tried just about everything but recently I've taken a shine to bottles of liquid watercolors. I think liquid watercolors are often associated with kids and classroom projects but I love having bottles of color on hand for bigger and messy watercolors projects.

There are all kinds of different brands but I like the 8oz bottles of Blick Liquid Watercolors. They are affordable and offer a variety of really beautiful saturated color. 

The cool thing about liquid watercolors is that you can use them straight from the bottle (really saturated) or you can water them down. You can even mix up your own colors. What I love most about them is that they are much easier to use with larger surfaces and messy mixed media techniques. Instead of being limited to small pan of color or tiny tube of paint (like most watercolors) you can use them a lot like you use acrylic paint! Here are a few ways that I am using my liquid watercolors.

I love filling a background with a wash of watercolor and using liquid color makes it WAY easier because you can fill a cup to dip large brushes.

You can easily create a stamp pad from a damp sponge by pouring color into the sponge. While this method is not good for rubber stamps, it works really well when using alternative items for stamping (cardboard rolls, vegi stamps, bubble wrap or anything with texture).

When I am painting with acrylics, I use a brayer to quickly fill a background with color. This same technique can also be used with liquid watercolors.

I love splattering and dripping and having larger quantities of liquid color to work with makes this process so much easier!

Since all that color is in liquid form, it is really easy to use it to fill spray misters, spray bottles, daubers and even water brushes. 

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