 Hi there, my name is Sandy and welcome to my YouTube channel. Today I'm going to be talking about watercolor powders. These have been part of the art world for a very long time, but they're just starting to make their appearance in Crafty Land. So I thought it might be time for us to take a look at the products. I have three videos for you today. I know that's a lot, but I wanted to break it into bite-sized pieces so you can watch the part you're most interested in. This video, number one, is all about the product itself. I'm going to compare two different brands, Brusho and Colorverse, and I'm going to show you the product itself. I'm going to show you how they both react with different techniques. So I'm going to show you a couple of really basic ways to use this. These are not rocket science. They're not anything I invented, but I just wanted to show you what the product is able to do in a very simple way. In video number two, I show you something a little more artistic. Instead of just making a background, I made a picture with some flowers out of these watercolor powders, and I do it again with both the Brusho and the Colorverse so you can see how they react and help to make maybe some of your own decisions about which product might be right for you if either one. Video number three was added at the end, and the reason is because I only had a limited color selection for one of the brands, and I had been waiting and waiting for them to arrive, and guess what arrived after all of that filming? You got it, the rest of the colors. So I decided to add a third video to this series so that you can have all of the swatches in front of you when you're making your decisions about what kinds of colors you might like to use. I also put on my Jennifer McGuire hat in that video and show you how I made colored labels for my bottles so that I can see what color is inside of them. So without any further ado and yammering on for me, let's get started. Throughout this video, this whole series, we're going to be having the Brusho on the left and the Colorverse on the right just so we can keep apples to apples throughout. So let's look at the bottles first. On the left is the Brusho that's made in Sheffield, England. They've been around for 35 years. There are 32 colors in their collection, and they make theirs in 15 gram bottles that don't have any kind of way to get the color out of them. So I'll show you in a little bit. I've poked a hole in them to make them a shaker bottle and put a thumbtack in it to hold the color in there. On the right is the Colorverse by Ken Oliver. Those come in a squeeze bottle so they just come out on their own, and they're only available in six colors, but they are made in the USA. They're in eight gram bottles, so they're a little over half the size of the Brusho just for comparison. Now I started out with some same name colors. There are a couple colors that are the same names, just the color name itself, between the two. So I wanted to see if they actually come out the same color, and I don't know if that's important to anybody or not, whether it's an exact ultramarine blue, but they don't seem to always be the same. Sometimes they are, sometimes they aren't. And throughout this, as I'm doing my sprinkling, you'll see I'm trying to get about the same amount of color on these so I get a more direct comparison, but it's very difficult when you're shaking powder. This stuff is very much like baby powder. You can see that little cloud coming off of the color burst. It's really soft, soft powder that comes out of these, so it's a little hard to be exact with it. This is not an exact science when we start trying to do comparisons, but I'm going to try to do apples to apples, and I'm also trying to do real time, so you can see how the color actually moves. So let's try a couple different techniques with these. You can start with dry paper. This is watercolor cardstock, and this is the Kansen XL. There will be links to all this, by the way, in the doobly-doo. And I'm just sprinkling on some colors, and I'm trying to keep the colors about the same between the two so that we get some semi-direct comparisons, and I'm just spritzing water on them, and you can see how the color just moves like mad as soon as you hit them with water. The higher up you are from the mister, from the paper, the better little tiny details you'll have. The more puddles you make, the more both of them are going to really mush. Now this color in particular, it's only available in the brush show. It's the black, and it's crazy how it has all these different colors, and it's orange, and blues, and purples, and this video is just not doing it justice. I wish you could see more of the color within it. It's just amazing. All right, a technique that you can use for this is wet, and then dry, and then wet. You don't have to do the last and wet, but I'm just going to wet them with, wet the papers with some water first, by spritzing them with my mister, and then sprinkle the colors on, and you can watch the colors move. And it's a different way to get the same kind of an effect. Sometimes you get more control over it, sometimes less, and it really depends on what look you want. And sometimes as this dries, you'll notice the red's not moving a whole ton. It's moving a little bit, and right there on the bottom right, there's a little puddle there, so it hits the puddle, and it starts to move. So you can spritz more water on top again. And these are so much fun to play with, and just see what happens. It's very random. If you're a control freak, this is probably not for you. So I am, I'm struggling a little bit myself. Now I'm going to call this pick-up painting. I don't really know what else to call it, other than if you have color that's left on your palette, whatever surface you're working on, then spritz it. And this is, I'm just putting some powder directly onto the, this is called a craft assistant that I'm using here. It's a 12x12 piece of metal from Ellen Hudson, and it cleans up really well, which is the reason I'm using it here. And you can see I can pick up just a little bit of color. I didn't put a whole lot of water down, but now if I put a lot more water down and then smoosh it around a little bit, I can get a very different look when I pull up my paper and smoosh it around, pick up different, you know, different swooshes of color, lots of fun looks that you can get with something like this. And the color burst works the same way. The color burst, I'm finding as I'm doing these tests, the color bursts are much brighter, more intense colors. So direct painting. Now these can be used as regular watercolor paints. And this is all the brush show. And I want you to notice something that the powders don't look like the colors that they're going to be when they're wet. That one I'm using right there, that's leaf green, but the powder looks orange. So don't be scared if you shake it out and it comes out a different color. That's perfectly okay. I did find that the best way to put the water into each one of these wells is by dripping it with an aqua brush, because you want to make sure you don't mix any of these powders by accident. And anytime you're going to swish something around, you risk dropping extra drops of color somewhere else. And the number of times that I had to clean out the yellow bins, because one little crystal of blue got in there. Just one little thing can totally contaminate your color. And I was trying to keep these as pure as possible. So I changed my water regularly as I did any of my painting with this. So now that I've got a palette full, I'm just going to paint this once with the brush show. You can just use them as watercolor paints. With this particular one, I was going to trim it out. So I didn't worry about staying within the lines. I'm trying to do this as a quick project. So I can show you how it actually looks on the paper. But all I did was paint it with water in these. You can mix specific colors too. You can take one green and mix it with another green and create whatever colors you want. Lots of opportunities to do that. So here I created a really dense background by sprinkling all that paint onto the watercolor paper. And then I just glued my flowers on top, those poinsettias. And I think it came out really beautifully. Lots of different ways that we can use this one product to get a lot of different looks. All right, now here is something I did. I took an entire sheet of die cuts. These are from an Ellen Hudson set that was just released. They thankful die cuts. And I taped on the back with some washi tape just to hold them in place so that I could spritz the whole thing. Now you could do each one individually, but I thought it would be a little bit faster and easier if I did the whole sheet at once. You could also do the whole sheet and then die cut it. But what I found happens here, if I die cut it first, is that I don't end up with quite as harsh a white outline around it. Because that water seeps down into the crack in between where the die cut has happened. And you don't end up with that as much of a white line. So that's why I did this. So I took both of them and just sprinkled powder all over them. I didn't have apples to apples colors unfortunately, because there's only six colors in the color burst. So I wanted to at least try to get close. So I'm kind of going for the yellows, the oranges and the reds and that kind of thing. And trying to keep about the same amount of color, the powder on there. You can see there's not very much just because we're watching this on a video. There really isn't very much. I can tell you that, honestly. You don't need much color. These are the equivalent of if you've ever used intense pencils and you use a little bit and it goes really far because it's very intense. That's the same principle with these. So if I spritz these from way high up, I'm several inches away from the paper, then I get this really polka dotted kind of a look with just little tiny stippling of colors. And that is a really great way to go. I decided I wanted to go in a little bit closer with a couple of spots. And since I can see the die cuts at an angle where I'm standing at, I can make sure that certain ones get covered in a certain way and try to spread the color around a little bit more on those. And you can go through and add more powder and fill in areas that didn't get enough, add more water. There's just so many possibilities for how you can approach this. But I wanted you to see as I'm doing this, watching this live and watching it in real time, so that you get an idea of how these actually work. So I'm spritzing a little bit more on the brush show on the left just to make sure I get all my pieces covered. Now on the right hand side, I didn't have a brown so I couldn't do an apples to apples. And I happen to know as an artist that green and red are opposites. So if the green mixes with the red, it should get to be a darker red, but that didn't actually happen. I mean part of it was that I sprinkled it in between some of those empty spots. So I ended up with bright green places, which is beautiful, but it didn't mix with the red to give me any kind of a brown color. So it didn't quite have the apples to apples that I was hoping for. And this is the results after they were all dried. And you can see that the color intensity on the color burst is much stronger than on the brush show. But you get a more artistic look I think with the brush show. I hope this has been helpful information for you. And if you would like to, please click the like button down below and you can also subscribe to receive more videos because I will be doing more with these watercolor powders. And I invite you to visit with either video number two, which is that floral that I told you about, or video number three all about labeling and organizing your watercolor powders. Thanks so much for spending a few minutes with me. I'll talk to you later. Bye bye.