Video: All About Hero Arts Liquid Watercolor

Hi everyone! This is Lydia Fiedler, and I'm thrilled to be a guest on the Hero Arts blog today, talking to you about my favorite thing in the universe - watercolor.

I know a lot of people are intimidated by watercolor, but in my opinion, it's actually the most forgiving art medium, and it's also so easy to use when you are out and about, because since both the solvent and the cleanup product - water - is available pretty much everywhere, and it's non-toxic and odor-free, which is a huge plus.

The other cool thing about watercolor, as opposed to most other types of paints, is that it comes in many different forms - tube paint, powders, and today's topic - liquid watercolor. This also means that I can keep buying watercolor mediums endlessly, which makes me extremely happy, if I'm being honest.

Hero Arts new Liquid Watercolor is unique in a few important ways in the world of liquid watercolor, and you'll see these in my video. It's a pigment-based watercolor, not a dye, so the blending and mixing properties are beautiful and very similar to traditional tube watercolor. They are inexpensive, and because they mix and blend so well, you can create hundreds of custom colors - you'll see 196 of them in my video, just for starters, and all of those were mixed with the eight colors I have - Strawberry, Mulled Wine, Dandelion, Moss, Pine, Deep Ocean, Indigo and ArtPrint Brown. Even if you don't mix them - just diluting each color gives you a wide range from intense to pastel. There's also a Black, which you can use to tone each of these colors and completely change the way they look.

I have a process for testing all new mediums I try - I tend to test watercolors with the same handful of experiments, and that helps me see how they are similar to or different from other mediums. I think I enjoy the testing and swatching process as much as I enjoy actually painting.

I'm a little bit obsessed with packaging too, and these little bottles make me happy for two reasons - they are slim and easy to store upright in a shallow drawer - and the integrated dropper is a must. I feel like a crafty scientist when these are on my desk.

You can rewet them when they dry in your palette (another unique watercolor win for making them portable), but a little goes a long way - you'll see how little I used for LOTS of experiments and several cards, so no need to use a whole dropper of color for a painting session.

When I was done, I just left my folding palette open until the pigments were dry, and then put it away - now it's ready to go with me to retreats and events.

For the card I painted in the video, I used Fun in the Rain, and just a few colors to show you how to mix and blend and create shadows and reflections with this medium. After I painted the image, I cut it out with the Circle Infinity Dies, and stamped the sentiment on black with Unicorn White Ink, and embossed with with the White Detail Embossing Powder, using the MISTI.

I hope you enjoy the video as much I as I did making it. Thanks for stopping by today!

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