Watercolour Balloons Tutorial with Life of Colour Brush Pens

Show-off your watercolour skills this valentine’s day following this easy tutorial video of a fabulous vintage Toyota ute of colourful balloons. Using the Watercolour Brush Pens from Life of Colour, this tutorial will help you express all of your many watercolour techniques. You won’t need many materials, and it looks super amazing when done. Maybe you could gift it to your special loved one, or your best gal-entine!!

Start by watching the video then gather your materials, you’ll master this in no time!

THE MATERIALS YOU WILL NEED

The first thing you’ll need is a HB pencil and rubber to draw the design up. Use the picture provided below to guide you.

Most importantly, you also need your own set of Life of Colour watercolour brush pens. Each pack contains 20 diverse colours including pastels, fluros, natural and primary colours. The specific colours you will need are shown in the picture below.

To blend the pens, you’ll also need a water brush which so conveniently comes in the pack. Or a single paintbrush and water which you may find easier to use.

You’ll also need watercolour paper. “Reeves” medium watercolour paper was used in this tutorial, however, depending on where you live, different brands will be available to you. Recommended brands of watercolour paper are: canson XL, reeves, Windsor and newton, Derwent academy.

An important thing to have is a blending tray for blending colours. In the materials picture above is a cloud shaped ‘trinket tray’ of which colours have been blended on. These trays can be found at any department store like: Target or Kmart for a few dollars. Although, any piece of plastic that you can wipe afterwards will work fine too.

Lastly you’ll also need a black fine tip pen to outline the watercolour once dry. Sometimes different pens can bleed into the watercolour even when you think it's dry. In this tutorial a black gel pen (Paper-Mate brand) was used as gel pens do not bleed. In comparison to a black fine liner pen which may bleed. Testing your pens is the best way to find the best solution!

SOME BLENDING TIPS THAT WILL REALLY HELP

• A good thing to recognise when painting the balloons is there is an evident light patch somewhere towards the edge. This is common in many balloon drawings and painting as it creates contrast rather than the balloon being solid colour. So, try to create a distinct lighter area and your balloons will look perfect. To help with this you can use paper towel to lighten areas! Dab the edge that you want to lighten and also around it creating multiple light patches. This works best when the watercolour is wet or damp.

• It can be so easy to over colour your balloons and letting too much ink from the pens come onto the page. Something that will really help with the application is wetting the surface of the paper evenly with water. This is so vital for painting the balloons as you want the colour bleeding together, so it doesn’t look blotchy or too vibrant. You can see this being demonstrated in the video.

• Here’s how to appropriately use your blending tray! To dilute a colour, you want to scribble a little ink onto your tray in a circle, add some water and mix it up. To create a colour, or mix two colours, scribble a bit of each colour next to each other and mix them together with a wet brush. Another thing you can do is pick up colour from the tray straight onto a pen. For example, when creating orange, you could pick up yellow onto the red brush and apply on the paper.

Don’t forgot to share your finished creations with us, and happy valentine’s day!

 Dying to get your hands after our Watercolour Pens after watching this?

Here you go!