Watercolor Art Using Coffee Filters

Hello my fellow DIYn beauties! I have quite the treat for you today! I am going to show you how to make a beautiful piece of art for your home using a coffee filter! This DIY is fun, easy and inexpensive to do, and when you are done you will have a beautiful piece of watercolor art that you will be dying to hang up ASAP!

I went down to my craft room and saw the pile of coffee filters that I had bought months ago. I was touring the dollar store and picked them up because I had seen a lot of cool DIY ideas on Pinterest involving coffee filters. I hadn’t even opened the package yet and thought tonight was a good as night as ever to do something. I have wanted to do a water color piece for a long time now, and I thought what better way to do a water color than with a coffee filter? So here we go!

Materials

• Canvas
• Coffee filters
• Markers
• Rubbing alcohol
• Paintbrush

 

Depending on where you are working, you may want to protect your work surface with some paper. Whenever I go to the dollar store and buy something breakable, I save that brown paper they wrap it in (hoader, I know). Anywho… Flatten out your coffee filter like so…

 

Now, start coloring! Really get creative with this part. Use whatever and however many colors you like. Draw any type of pattern you like, too! Have fun!

 

This is what I came up with…

Next, lay your colored coffee filter on your canvas

Pour some rubbing alcohol in a dish and then start to paint the rubbing alcohol over your coffee filter

You want to saturate the coffee filter enough so that they ink from the marker runs through to the canvas. The markers that I used were Spectrum Noir. They are alcohol based markers and they are my favorite! I got them from a craft store that was going out of business so I got them at a steal, too!

I used my scraping tool that I use when I am applying vinyl, to smooth over the coffee filter. This also helps the colors to bleed into the canvas nicely.

I applied the coffee filter in other spots on the canvas and repeated the brushing of the rubbing alcohol. When I removed the coffee filter, this is what I had.

The colors weren’t as bright as I hoped, so I made another coffee filter and repeated the steps.

Much better.

I put this quote on by cutting out vinyl with my Cricut. If you don’t have a Cricut, you could buy vinyl letters from a craft or dollar store. You could also use a stencil and paint, or free hand paint something. This is the beauty of DIY — there are no rules. So get creative!

My daughter even got in on the fun! She loved doing this, and even more so I loved crafting with her! I think we have a little DIYer on our hands!! tbh, I like hers better than my own! 😀

You could even not doing anything after the water coloring and just hang the canvas as is.

This one is my daughter’s… I love it! 

I love our new masterpieces!

You can see my DIY fancy liquor decanters in this photo, too! They are super easy to make as well. You can find the tutorial here.

Let me know what you think about this DIY, and if you have any questions, don’t hesitate to reach out!