My students just turned in a sketchbook assignment where they could choose to paint with markers or do a gesso transfer. There are lots of good tutorials online about gesso tranfers to check out. This one is pretty good.
Most of my students chose to do the marker route. I'm ok with that, they had fun with it.
This is how you "paint" with markers:
Don't have watercolors? Scared of them? No biggie! You can use crayola washable markers (really any water based marker). This was a happy accident that happened during my student's collaboration project. I love the effect as the marker bleeds. Simply draw what you want. Then you can use a wet paintbrush to bleed the marker.
You can also use paint. As you use paint over the marker, your paint and marker colors will blend together. So fun! Plus there's practically no clean up.
I love the way these sketchbook assignments turned out. This semester of students have really embraced their sketchbooks. Good student assignments= happy teacher.