Elegant Writer Technique

About a month ago someone shared this amazing video on the Dare To Get Dirty Prize Drawing thread. I've included my first experiments below today's apple drawing.

 Here's my drawing and the picture I copied

I began by activating the outside of the lines in the drawing with water. I used a medium size brush and once the colors started to bleed, swept them outward. I decided the sun would come from the right so I shadowed to the left. 

Now I'm activating inside the drawing starting from the bottom and moving up with the color. 

I did a lot of dabbing on the apples to get more purple but left the bushel basket ink more in the blue/grey

Here you can see the difference between the activated and non-activated apples.

Here's the final look before adding any color.

Starting on the bushel basket with my Hot Cocoa Chamelon Pen

Completely colored with just 3 Chameleon pens (Hot Cocoa, Crimson Red and Olive Green

Here's the final look of my card. I sponged Tempting Turquoise along the edges. I framed with black and used a sheet of Kraft embossed in the Square Lattice ef as my base. I stamped the sentiment in Versafine Onyx

 Here are earlier attempts.  I had an ancient pen in my stash and when I tried the technique it seemed completely purple and pink instead of having any blues/greens like in the video. (She did say that the colors have changed in the newer pens and mine was definitely NOT new!)

Well, I loved the technique so the next time I was in a craft store I whipped out a coupon and bought a set of the Elegant Writer Pens. They are meant for calligraphy and are black pens (they sell colors but I haven't tried that out yet) but because they are water based ink, when you activate them with water the colors separate out. My next drawing was of rocks and then I went back and watched the video again and drew a scene very similar to the one she had sketched and used for the tutorial.

I realized later that it looks like 2 bunnies, but I drew rocks!

On this one I'd watched the video again and added the color on the rocks from the bottom going up. I also used the new pen on this.

This is almost all color just from the one black pen!I sketched the flower then activated with water. I added a little Sahara Sand to shade around the flower and in the stem. I also used a purple marker to add in some detail to the edge of the petals.
I watched another video and got the idea to use a stencil for my next trial.

I taped down my stencil over a piece of watercolor paper and used my pen to outline and fill in the image.

Here's what it looks like as you start to activated the ink. I used a larger brush and wet the area around the image with water, then put the edge of the brush against the outside line of the image to start the process. I then stroked outward to spread the color around.

Here's the before and after. Once you have the image how you like it, take a fine mister and spritz from above the image to let a very fine mist land onto the image. This will just barely activate the lines that you haven't activated yet and once dry, they will no longer be able to be activated so that when you go to color the image, you don't accidentally start a process that you don't want.

I used my grey Chameleon pen to color the plane. I went back with the black pen to fill in the gaps left by the stencil.

The leaves and fish are stenciled. I drew the heron, copying from a color page I found online. All are only activated with water. If you want more of the purple color, you take a tissue or towel and dab at the wet color. On the fish image, I had used a LOT of ink and then while it was wet I added pretzel salt.

Here's the heron colored with Chameleon Pens