Three ways to use watercolor brush pens

When I got these fun watercolor brush pens and fine-tipped paintbrushes from Crafts & Colors, I immediately thought of my upcoming wedding this summer. See, I'm a real DIYer, and for my friends making a long trip just to be my bridesmaids, or for my closest friends from high school in my wedding, or for my roommates who played Dutch Blitz with me just about every day ... generic, store-bought thank you cards simply won't do.

Considering the fact I'm gonna have eight bridesmaids and numerous others helping pull this thing off, it was time for me to get busy.

The only problem was that I couldn't find any great tutorials about watercolor brush pens on Pinterest. There was plenty about water brush pens, which I'll be doing a separate tutorial on, but those aren't quite the same as watercolor brush pens.

I'd much rather have a handmade card than a store-
bought one any day.

Getting these watercolor brush pens was just the motivation I needed to pull out my supplies one cloudy afternoon and start experimenting for myself. I filled pages with strokes, scribbles and water - lots of water. And I came up with a few techniques that gave my lettering some pretty cool effects.

Holding the brush

Before we get started, you need to know the right way to hold the brush, which will save you a lot of frustration later on. Shelby at lettering blog Little Coffee Fox suggests holding the pen at a 20 degree angle.

Brush pens are usually held at a 45 degree angle. "But that’s too extreme of an angle," Shelby wrote. "You’ll lose control of the tip, and (watercolor) will shoot out in unexpected ways, ruining your watercolor lettering."

Now that we know how to hold the tools, let's get started!

Two color lettering

I think this is one of my favorite techniques. Start by penciling in your letters - extra important here! One thing I love about Crafts & Colors' pens is that you can erase pencil lines even after drawing over them.

Take your lighter color and draw the word as usual. Now take your darker color and carefully trace over the bottom half of each letter.

Here comes the fun part! Use your water brush pen to blend the colors together. Drag the lighter color into the darker one first, then very gently drag a little of the darker one to the lighter color. Your lines will get a little thicker when you add water to them, so just try to keep the up strokes as thin as possible.

Watch the video above to see what I'm talking about!

How to get a faded look

Watercolor brush pens can also give you a painterly look that's a lot easier to achieve than with traditional watercolors. It's much easier to control a brush pen than a paintbrush, and you don't have to keep dipping a brush pen in the paint. This technique will make your word or phrase start out light and gradually get darker.

I only used a red pen and an orange pen to create this card.

After sketching out your letters, start by dipping the brush pen in your water. The longer you dip it, the lighter the ink will be, so experiment to see what gives you an effect you want. As the water gets used up as you draw, the ink will go back to its original color.

The only downside of this technique is that you can't really go back and fix anything you messed up, because of how the color changes. So be confident with your letters!

This works best with medium to dark colors because lighter ones become too light when dipped in water.

How to blend your colors with watercolor brush pens

I came up with this last technique after reading a post from lettering blogger Dawn Nicole, who suggested coloring on a blending palette and mixing the colors together before using a water brush pen to pick up the pigment.

You can easily create multi-color words.

This fun twist on that technique will make your colors fade into each other a bit more. Rub a darker pen on some plastic to deposit the pigment. Rub the lighter pen on the plastic to pick up the darker pigment, and start writing.

Don't worry about "ruining" your pen, because as you write, the darker ink will slowly be used up, and the original pen color will come back. You can either keep dipping the pen in the darker pigment, or just write the whole word out. Blend the colors into each other even further with a brush and some water.

Try similar colors together, like red and yellow or blue and green, since some colors will just look muddy together.

Watercolors make for great thank you notes.

To finish my designs, I used the fine-tipped paintbrushes to paint little borders of flowers and leaves in the corners.

These little thank you cards were really simple to make and probably took me 20 minutes max for each! Just measure and cut a 9"x12" piece of watercolor paper into four pieces and practice some of these techniques. You could also glue smaller pieces on folded cards for a more traditional card.

Crafts & Color's watercolor brush pen set also comes with a water brush, so keep an eye out soon for another tutorial with that!

What are some of your favorite brush pen techniques? Let me know in the comments!