A pleasant surprise happened while painting background pages for my Journal. I have been using a wide flat brush to paint acrylic or watercolor backgrounds. For some reason I pulled out one of my large sponges, got it wet, dipped it into some tube watercolor and started painting. Wow, the color went on smoothly and had some depth to it as I pushed the water around. The actual time it took to paint the page was about half of what it takes when I use the broad brush. When I finished painting the pages, I then used the clean side of the sponge and started to remove some of the paint and now it looks a bit like suede. Hmm. I am thinking that I will be using the sponge in the future to do these background pages.
How do you paint your backgrounds? Let me know.
Simply Artistic Pleasures 
Lordy, I use whatever is within my reach. When I was painting all over the house, I would “clean” my brushes and paint roller on pages in various books which would be spread all over my kitchen counters! This works especially well when the roller is almost dry – later you can ‘roll’ a second color over it to give it depth.
another thing I like to do is to tear or cut pages to give some variety in the size of pages. Most are just torn from top to bottom, but sometimes I will cut a page into a semi-circle, a triangle, or even flower petals!
“Sam”
Great idea – what kind of sponge? Natural or man made? I don’t have a secret technique for paint, but I do have one for watercolor crayons: babywipes. You need to wring them out a bit so they are damp and not dripping. Either rub the crayon directly onto the baby wipe and apply the wipe to your paper, or rub the crayon onto the paper and soften with the baby wipe.
Marci replied: I used a sea sponge purchased from the local art store. Thank you for sharing the technique of watercolor crayons and babywipes. I’ll have to try that one next and then post the results.