Watercolor Pinterest Flop...

It happens to the best of us... Pinterest fails.  It's a fact of life for all Pinterest users.  A while back I came across this pin:

                                                                        Source: alisaburke.blogspot.com via Kristen on Pinterest

The caption was simply: "Watercolor over white crayon."  And I thought to myself, "That's brilliant!"  Don't you agree?  Well it didn't work out so well...

The root of my problem is that whoever originally pinned this pinned the blog homepage and not the blog post... big pet peeve of mine.  Well I searched for a while on the blog trying to find the tutorial, but I didn't have any luck.  The blog is AMAZING! But it has way too many posts for me to look through them all.

But I forged ahead anyway!  I thought it sounds simple and logical, I'll just give it a go anyway...

I taped down my watercolor paper so that it wouldn't wrinkle too badly, and then began drawing a cute twig/vine and leaf design.  I'm usually pretty bad at drawing these kinds of patterns, but I really liked how this one turned out.  I know you probably can't see it very well though... it's white crayon on white paper, there was only so much my camera could do, haha!

Then came the disappointment, I began doing a light wash on my paper and it was quickly obvious that this was not working the way the caption on Pinterest claimed it would.

This is not at all what I was expecting, you can hardly see the pattern at all!  The crayon did repel some of the paint, but not nearly enough.

I am not giving up on this one though.  I plan to try this again sometime because that original pin is just too cute, I want one too!  I think maybe part of my problem is I used watercolor paint from a tube, I think this might work better with the cheap kid's button watercolors.  I think I will try that next, and I will let you all know when I solve the mystery!  If you have any suggestions please share, I'd love to hear them!