H20 AND WATERCOLORS

H2O’s is a “cake” form of watercolor paint made of mica powder and a binder. The binder doesn’t lend color to the mica powders so you get a pearlescent finish. To use cake forms of paint you need to add a little water to solid cake. I like to use a spritzer bottle and give it a couple of squirts. I let it sit for a minute and it will absorb into the cake. You can then use your paint brush to mix it. It is not necessary to liquefy more than you are going to need to paint your project. Extra squirts of water can be added if needed as you are working. A word of caution regarding the care of your H2O’s—let them dry before putting the cap back on. I have had customers tell me that they have found mold on their paints. Because of the pearlescent finish I prefer to almost always emboss my outline images. The pearlescent finish tends to obscure the dye based ink. The really great thing about H2O’s is that they will dry on any type of paper, they are fade proof. & light colors will show up on dark papers! Primarily stamper’s use H2O’s in two methods, one is to paint in an outline stamp. The other use is to paint on a broad solid stamp. In the first method I find that I spend a lot of time “lifting” paint off or removing excess paint with a clean brush. If you find that your image is over painted because your brush was loaded with too much paint you can move some of the paint around into the areas your need paint and at the same time work back and forth wiping excess paint onto a paper towel. Periodically you will need to rinse the brush off with clean water, touch to paper towel to remove excess water and continue. H2O’s are not as forgiving as watercolor pencils. If you get paint on an area and wish to remove it, you will need to work quickly with a clean damp brush and try to remove what you can. I find depending on the color very little lifts or removes. You can blend colors on a plastic pallet if you don’t have the exact shade you need. Otherwise painting with H2O’s isn’t that different from painting with any other watercolor. It’s all about the water. Control the amount of water—less water if you want more control of where the paint will flow. Painting directly onto a solid stamp is a lot of fun. You can get really lovely results. For the class sample I did a panel using a solid pear. I applied the paint directly to the rubber, blending the colors as I painted. I spritz the image about 3 times at a distance of about 10 inches and stamp. You can get multiple images by spritzing again and sometime even a third image without having to repaint. Of course each time you do this the image is lighter. The one thing to consider with this technique is uniformity as far as moisture is concerned. If you take a long time to paint your image when you are done parts of it might be much drier than other parts. If this is the case then I would wait and let the whole thing dry. Then spritz the image and stamp. As I said, you want to hold the stamps about 10 inches away from the water bottle so that you get a fine even misting of water not big drops. Your stamp should look “sweaty” not drippy. My pear had no cut out area within the image, say like a solid leaf might have vanes, if it does than err on the less water side than too much or you will loose the definition.