Watercoloring Sakura Style Tutorial

Card Details: Friendship Boutique; Rectangle Greetings; Cardstock: DCWV dsp & Bazzil textured & SU ww; Ink: Stazon; Sakura Glitter Pens; Aqua painter; Marvy Scallop punch; Fiskars Corner Scissors; K&Co. Gems; Primas; Stickles

I'd like to share with you today one of the cards we made at last month's Stop & Stamp Class at GinaK Design's store in McFarland. We watercolored this beautiful stamped image with Sakura's glitter pens and an aquapainter. This is one of my favorite ways to add a shimmery glitter to a stamped image.

I don't know if this is an official technique, but it's one that I've enjoyed doing for a while now. I watched a demonstration at a local stamp store a few years ago with Sakura glitter pens. While she was coloring with the pens, I noticed how the pen ink remained wet on the paper for a short period of time. I began to experiment with these glitter pens in my stamp room on different papers and found that they lend themselves well to watercoloring.

When I began working at Gina's store, I showed this technique to her. She was the one who came up with the fun name for this technique: "Watercoloring Sakura Style."


Watercoloring Sakura Style Tutorial

Stamp your image in Stazon or your favorite waterproof ink. The best papers for this technique are coated cardstocks or Watercolor paper . This stamped image is from Karen Lockhart. It's one of the practice papers we were given to play with at the Copic Certification class in Milwaukee last week. It is stamped in Momento black ink on Neenah smooth white cardstock.


Work on small areas at a time so that the pen ink doesn't have time to dry. Follow the lines of your stamp then wash over the pen ink with your aqua painter - just like the Colored Pencils & OMS technique.



The best images for this technique are detailed ones. Working with one leaf or flower at a time will produce the best results. Don't overblend the pen ink with water from the aqua painter or the paper will pill and/or some pen lines may remain and be unable to blend away.

For larger areas, it is sometimes helpful to do a light water wash over the area you're going to color with the aqua painter first. While the paper is still damp, draw a few strokes along the image line with the glitter pen, and then blend with the aqua painter. That's what I did for the flowers and the large flower pot.


To highlight the watercolored spots, take the same colored pen and retrace over a few lines. Don't brush the aquapainter over these areas so that the lines will remain bold.

The clear Sakura glitter pen is my favorite pen of all. I use it on almost anything when I've finished coloring. Following these same steps outlined above, you can watercolor with the clear pen over Copics, OMS & Coloring Pencils, Watercolor Crayons & Pencils, etc. It adds a shimmer and shine that looks a lot like Twinkling H2O's, but with a lot less work.
I hope the pictures help walk you through this simple technique. It's really hard to take a good enough picture to show the shimmer that you can achieve with these pens. Try it out for yourself - you'll be amazed at the sparkly shimmer your images will have with this technique. If you try Sakura Style Watercoloring, let me know. I'd love to see your project!
Thanks for stopping by!
Jessica