Make Your Own Water Paint Coloring Book

I had some watercolor pencils and a kiddo who likes to paint. (I've made her cheap watercolors in this post and cheap and tasty fingerpaints in these posts.) And decided to try and convert a coloring book to a paint with water book.

So I outlined and colored in the areas that would be shaded and thought the water colors would bleed over into the uncolored portion. About 50% of the picture.

But it didn't do it enough for my satisfaction, especially the lighter colors, so I tried again covering about 80% of the picture and had my toddler water brush it.

Before After

Not extraordinary, so now you know. Although it was a fun excuse for Mom to color, although she prefers the color range choices of a 96 color crayon box.

And then of course, the munchkin spent the next 30 minutes using her wet brush to paint the pages in the coloring book sans color.

So, even cheaper water color book option - hand the three year old a blank coloring book, a bowl of water and a brush and let her imagination provide the colors.

UPDATE: I stumbled back upon where I got the idea. Off of inspired ideas, she uses watercolor paper and draws the pictures. Maybe the watercolor paper would make them turn out better, but all my girl wants to color is princesses and butterfly fairies, don't have time to free hand draw that, so I think I'll stick with the coloring book method.