Dear Debbie….

For the first photo, I inked my stamp with the Stampin’ Write Marker. When you do this, before you stamp you actually “huff” on the image to re-moisten it. It may dry a little as you are coloring so re-moistening is a must. Notice how clear the image shows up:

 For the two bottom photo’s, I inked my stamp image and spritzed some H2O on the ink to give it a water-colored effect. A few spritzes was all I needed.

Next up is multiple coloring. Do you often use a sentiment that has multiple words and wish you could use different colored inks? This is a great way to accomplish that. I colored this sentiment using two Stampin’ Write Markers:

You can also omit words by only coloring the ones you need. Or you could color one word only. For example “happy birthday”. If you want only the “happy”, color the one word and stamp. Just make sure your stamp is super clean, even stamping on scrap paper first before coloring to make sure any residue is removed.

Do you love to color lined images? Another great way to color is using a Blender Pen and your Stampin’ Write Makers. Using a Clear Block, scribble the color from the markers and use this as your color palette. Dip your Blender Pen and color! My favorite black ink to use for this method is StazOn Jet Black. It will never smear or smudge:

Now let’s move on to embossing folders. In the samples below I used 3 Stampin’ Write Markers and colored some of the embossing. You need to open your embossing folder and color on the “bumpy” side. In the first sample I colored, inserted the cardstock, closed the folder and applied pressure with my fingers. Notice the  cute outlined look:

For the 2nd sample, I again colored the embossing “bumps” with 3 Stampin’ Write Makers but this time I spritzed them with H2O, inserted the cardstock, closed the folder and pressed with my fingers. The lines become more visible and detailed. You could also color and run this through your Big Shot Machine for colored embossing.

Next in line is coloring on a clear block and stamping. Now if you go straight from coloring on the block to stamping, it does not work so well as the color dries too quickly as you can see in the sample below:

The 2nd time around I spritzed with H2O and the results were much better. It gives a great background look to add stamped images over like I’ve done above.

For my last sample I stamped a flower image using StazOn Ink and used 3 shades of yellow from light, medium and dark to color my image.