I’m coming on my two year anniversary from the end of my chemo (it’s at the end of next month, so basically on Christmas Eve), and I have a check up with my hemato-oncologist in two days. I sketched this to give her with a box of pralines, a small token of my gratitude for the past two and a half years:

It’s a new kind of paper so it came out a bit more blotchy than I’d like, which made me want to play with it a bit more. I wanted to make another quick card for one of my mom’s doctors, who’s retiring, so I had some pigment fun:

I then used Schmincke’s Aqua Bronze rich gold to add some writing to it. Aqua Bronze is basically a small jar full of glitter powder that you mix with a little bit of water (a very, very small bit of water) on your palette and it turns into metallic watercolour. Unlike other metallic watercolours Aqua Bronze has good coverage and opacity, and it really pops off the page. It’s the very last thing you add to your drawing, after everything else has completely (and I mean completely) dried up. You need very little of the powder and even less water, a cheap plastic palette and a cheap synthetic brush and you’re all set.

There are several different kinds of metallic hues, and they all work the same. Do remember that you want to use a cheap brush and a palette you don’t care about because this is glitter. You also don’t want to clean the brush in your regular water pot, or to use the same water for another drawing later on. Aqua Bronze sticks to everything, and you can’t ensure that it was completely cleaned out of your tools, so don’t use your best brush or your usual palette for this.

You mix up the powder with a tiny bit of water and a bit of patience (it takes less water and more time than you think) and then apply it to your dry drawing. The paint stays in place but if you brush your fingers on it, they will come out with a fine dusting of glitter. Here’s how it turned out:

If you want even more opacity, you’re going to have to use a paint marker. In this case I wanted the yellow in the abstract blue rose to be reflected in the thank you written in gold so I wanted the soft edges of the Aqua Bronze.

If you’re thinking about creating watercolour holiday cards and want to add a little bling to them, Aqua Bronze could be an option. I’d select one colour as the jars aren’t cheap, and I’d finish the sketches and then add the glitter highlights in one batch.