How to Make Watercolor Backgrounds with Tombow Dual Brush Pens

As much as I’d love to call myself an artistic person, I’d probably lean more heavily toward calling myself a crafty person.  I can whip up some pretty sweet wall art, but hand me a brush or a charcoal pencil and I feel kind of lost.  No beautiful paintings or drawings for this girl.  Luckily, there are a few tips and tricks for those of crafty people like me to make some pretty great artistic effects.  This is one of those tricks.  If you want another trick, make sure to check out How to Create Striped Brush Lettering.)

I love the look of watercolor backgrounds.  Take my blog header, for example.  Unfortunately, I didn’t create that one, but I recently found a neat trick to create your own watercolor backgrounds….without watercolors!

Materials for Watercolor Background

• Tombow Dual Brush Pens (my favorite are the primary and bright sets)
• Cardstock or watercolor paper (I used this cardstock)
• Paper towel
• Tombow blending palette (optional)

How to Create Watercolor Backgrounds with Tombow Dual Brush Pens

First, you’ll need to cut or rip your paper.  Your paper should be no bigger than your brush pen box or the blending palette.

Next, choose your colors. Make sure to choose colors that blend well and won’t turn muddy or brown when mixed (hint: complementary colors make brown – red and green, blue and orange, yellow and purple).  If you have complementary colors in your color choice, don’t put them directly next to each other.

Using the brush side of the marker, scribble areas of color on your marker case (or your blending palette).  Make the “color blob” about the size of the paper that you are using.

You’ll notice that I placed yellow and purple next to each other.  These two colors don’t seem to be as much of a problem as the other complementary color mixes.

Next, spray the plastic with a spray bottle filled with water.  The box shouldn’t be dripping wet, but each portion of color should have beads of water on it.

Take your paper and place it on top of the wet color.  Use your hand to smooth the paper to spread the water, keeping the paper in the same place.

Lift the paper off the box from one of the corners and place it on a surface you don’t mind getting a bit messy.

Optional: Use a paper towel to dab the puddled portions of color.  If you’d like some darker spots, feel free to leave those to air-dry.

Let it dry and use it for lettering backgrounds, greeting cards, or scrapbook accents.

Check out the video below to see the step by step process:

Beautiful, isn’t it?

Interested in more uses for the Tombow Brush Pens?  Check out The Beginners Guide to Brush Lettering.