How To Hobby || Watercolor-inspired Greeting Cards

This is my second installment in my series How To Hobby, dedicated to one of my friends who always says she wants more hobbies. So I decided to do a series covering all of my extensive and random hobbies with the hope of one of them catching her fancy. Check out my first post in this series!

Welcome back to my favorite non-book series here on my blog! This week I want to share a really fun watercolor-esque technique I've learned that I use to make almost all of the postcards I send out to friends.

Originally I was going to do a MASSIVE post on watercoloring in general but I decided to break it into two: this one is more watercolor-inspired, and the next one will be more traditional watercolor.

The final product is on the left! It is a super easy but still cool looking way to make artwork/thank you cards/postcards/whatever you want.

What you'll need:

markers of any sort

pen of any sort

plastic ziplock bag (generic will not work)

haha jk of course a generic ziplock bag will work

#Generic4Life

water spritzer (not necessary, but helpful)
and some paper

Pick out two (or more) colors to use in your card. I used Tombrow brush markers because I had a long lasting love of bullet journaling but really Crayola markers would work really well.
With no precision, draw several large patches of color with your markers. I tend to keep the colors separate because I want to keep my markers clean but it doesn't really matter.
Don't worry if the colors don't look very vibrant-- just scribble some color onto the ziplock bag
Now you want to sprinkle some water over the ziplock bag. This can be achieved with a brief, diffuse spray of a water bottle BUT if you don't have one (I have one that I use to teach my cat that defacing the furniture with his claws is not acceptable) you don't need one. Use a cup of water and a brush-- or your fingers-- to flick water onto the ziplock bag.

here's the trick: too much water and your paper will pill (small lumps everywhere; not the end of the world) too little water and the colors won't blend well

Place your paper on top of the bag and run your hand over the paper to distribute the color. Flip the paper over, peel off the ziplock bag and you're done!

Et voila!

That's it! Now you should have a loose blended tie-die/watercolor background to write your message on. If there are pools of water on your paper you might want to blot them off. I'm impatient so I dried the paper off with a heat gun (just a super powered hair dryer) and then wrote on my message.

Here's another card I made using this technique-- this one is a bit fancier because I used an pen full of embossing ink to draw the little graduation hat/champagne and then put some embossing powder over it and used a heat gun to get those raised edges.

Have I inspired you to use what you probably have laying around to make some fun art?? If so, I have a couple of cool sites that you should check out.