quick tip : making watercolors with inexpensive acrylic paints

My little fling with cheap acrylic paints (you can see how I used them to make neon mists here and more experiments with mist-making here) took an interesting turn recently when I started wondering about watercolors. Both Peerless Watercolor Papers and Inktense Watercolor Pencils have been popular lately for scrapbookers looking to buy their first watercolor sets to play with, but I really didn't want to spend lots of money (both options are a bit pricey) for something that I would only use on layouts every once in a while.

And then I started thinking about those inexpensive little bottles of paint that I've been buying on sale recently and using to make color mists...and, let's face it, just because I like them. :) I picked these up for .89 a bottle at Michaels minus a 15% off a total purchase coupon a couple of weeks ago, using the palette from Crate Paper's The Pier as a shopping guide.

As I was thinking, the logic went a bit like this...if acrylic paints can be watered down to make spray mists, and if scrapbookers often water down their spray mists to use as watercolors, does it then stand to reason that acrylic paints can be watered down enough to use as watercolors?

The short answer is, yes, they absolutely can!

When I mixed this tray up, I squirted a dab of paint into each well and then used a brush to mix with plenty of water. Even that little bit of paint was almost too much, though, and I later found that using the brush to get just a tiny bit of paint from the bottle and mixing it into a well of water was a much better way to go.

You can see in the photo below that you definitely get a watercolor look with this technique with some areas of pooling where the color is a bit darker. Love that. One way they differ from traditional watercolors, though, is that you can't go back in with a wet brush and move the color around after it's dried- once it's down, it's down, but I can definitely live with that difference, especially when it means that I don't need to buy yet another art medium for my scrapbooking (yay for multitasking!).

Oh, and the reason I used The Pier as inspiration for the paint colors in the first photo? Because the June kits from Citrus Twist are full of this collection (and many more)! Sneaks of the kits were released yesterday, and I wanted to quickly share them here before I dash off for the day.

Main Kit - "Boardwalk"

Project Life Kit - "Sunshine Day"

Embellishment Kit - "Ferris Wheel"

Patterned Paper Kit - "Hello Summer"

Add-On Kit - "Charming"

Stamp Add-On - "Endless Summer"

Note: The stamp add-on is new this release. In order to give more people a chance to get the Add-on kit stamp, Citrus Twist removed it from the Add-On kit and made it available as its own add-on. Main and Project Life kit stamps will still be exclusive to those kits. 

Have a lovely Tuesday, everyone!