Hi friends! I’m back today with a fun technique that involves stamping with ink….. and water! No paintbrush required. Interested? Read on to find out more!

The technique is called watercolor stamping, and the basic idea is that you ink up your stamp as normal, spray it with a little water, and then stamp onto either watercolor or mixed media paper. It gives a thicker impression, as if you had actually painted it. The images on the left are stamped with just ink, and the images on the right are stamped in ink and then spritzed with water before stamping.

You can see that it gives it more of a painted look. A note of caution, however. The key is to lightly spritz the inked image; you can see the top right highland cow has a little bit of a blur to it, and that’s because even though I sprayed lightly, too much water piled up on the ink, and caused the distortion. MInimal water application is definitely the key when using this technique.

I tested this technique on Arteza 140 lb watercolor paper, Canson 138 lb mixed media paper, Simon Hurley 110 lb heavy white cardstock, and Stampin’ Up! 80 lb white cardstock. Only the watercolor paper and mixed media paper were suitable, as both white cardstocks produced a blurred image.

This is the card I made with the technique: both the cow and the checkerboard pattern are watercolor stamped; the greeting is not. If I were to remake this card, I would change how I make the cow as it seems a little pale. I would watercolor stamp the cow in black, and color it in with alcohol markers. This is what the cow would look like:

Image © Stampin’ Up! ®

Want to give it a try? Download the free tutorial and share what you make!

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