Watercoloring is a great way if, like me, you’re not a particularly good colorist, mainly because it’s a relatively forgiving technique. Water will help you blend out colors and sharp lines, at least a bit. Of course there is much to learn here, but even as a beginner I felt confident enough about my first water colored cards to actually send them out to people.
In the second half of the video I’m showing you some technique, when I’m coloring one of the envelopes. I used several colors of Distress Ink (minis) and Distress Markers. It was simply what I had, hence the combination of inks and markers. Since these Distress products are all water-based and really work well together, it’s great to combine them and create the color palette that you’re looking for.
Watercoloring is a great technique if you’re out on the road: contrary to scrapbooking, it takes very little to take with you what you need, and to have some relaxing moments while you’re not at home. Just do the stamping at home, and color them on the road. So while this will probably not become my main hobby, it will definitely stay in my papercraft repertoire!
In one of my previous blog posts I showed you some backgrounds with Ranger’s Texture Paste, which dries white and matte, and is porous like paper. Ranger also has a Transparent Texture Paste, which has some significantly different properties.
By the way, both of these pastes have now been rebranded as a Tim Holtz Distress Texture Paste, in case you’d like to go shop for them.
Properties of Transparent Texture Paste (Ranger/Distress)
This paste has a lower viscosity (it’s thinner and not as ‘pasty’ as the regular texture paste) and though it’s semi-opaque when you apply it, it will dry completely clear. Also, it will dry glossy, and is not porous at all. So in fact it will act as a resist, instead of taking color like the regular paste does.
This gives you the opportunity to apply texture but with different techniques, compared to the regular Texture Paste by Ranger.
Technique: Transparent Texture Pasteas a color sealer
I created an Indian summer-themed background with this transparent glossy paste, using the following steps:
Ink up the entire tag with four different colors of Distress Stain – I did use the dabbers this time, instead of spraying the Stains by pouring them into spray bottles;
Place the tag upright and spray generously with water, almost drenching it, to get a heavy flow of color going from top to bottom. Then heat dry.
3. Apply Transparent Texture Paste through a stencil, and let air-dry for a couple of hours (drying time could probably be shorter but I wanted to make sure).
4. Since everything underneath the Transparent Texture Paste was now sealed, I could spray anything over it. So I sprayed it with two of the same colors of my palette, but this time with Distress Oxide Sprays: Oxides always dominate dye inks – except where the dyes have been sealed.
Using a splatter box whenever you spray a color medium prevents a lot of cleaning duty…
5. So I removed the Oxide from the textured leaf pattern with a damp cloth, revealing the leaves in bright dye colors, in the midst of a now more chalky colored background.
Because I used the same color palette in Oxide, the effect was subtle. You can imagine completely different effects if you use more contrasting colors, or even black!
All in all I like the ‘seal-in’ effect this transparent paste brings; however, if you were to apply it to uncolored paper, you’d never be able to color it afterward, since it’s a resist. Something to think about, and especially: play around with!
The two backgrounds I’m sharing today I created with one technique, but with different color schemes, generating a completely different atmosphere.
I added some texture paste through a stencil and let it air-dry for about an hour to make sure it was dry. Then I sprayed with Distress Stains and heat-dried. The next layer consisted of several droplets of Distress Oxide, since I knew Oxide would always dominate dye ink – which I learned from the Tim Holtz demos I watched recently.
What I really like about Ranger’s Texture Paste is that when it’s dry, it reacts to color mediums the same way as paper: it takes color really well, and gives it up when you want to lift it off with a damp paper towel.
I chose a warm autumn palette for the first tag, with Peeled Paint, Twisted Citron and Wild Honey, with some splats of Cracked Pistachio on top.
For the second tag I aimed at a vintage look, using Old Paper, Frayed Burlap, Bundled Sage, and Hickory Smoke, with some drops of Tim Holtz’s latest color Speckled Egg on top. I also sprayed some Brushed Pewter Distress Mica Spray, which is the silver color, over the entire tag once everything else had dried.
The stencils were both by Tim Holtz, one small and one large.
All in all I really liked this technique: it was easy, relatively quick and ideal to create some great looking backgrounds.
So yesterday I kicked off my new blog category, Mixed Media. Many of those will be blog exclusive, so no video. But, you will get clear pictures and descriptions of what I did and which products I used.
These two art backgrounds are Distress Tags by Tim Holtz (for Ranger), a mixed media heavy stock. For the first, I started with one of Tim Holtz’s stencils and gently dabbed some Distress Micro glaze through it in two spots, quite randomly. Micro glaze will work as a resist. So when I sprayed three colors of distress stain (the first three in the picture) over it, the stencil’s dotted pattern showed up white.
By the way, you may notice that there are hardly any actual spray bottles in the picture; that is because my main stash of Stains consists of the earlier Distress Stains, which were dabber bottles. So I removed the dabbers and poured some of the Stain in small empty spray bottles I had bought at the dollar store – turning them into Distress Spray Stains quite easily 🙂
So I went along and I placed a second stencil (the smaller one on the right) and sprayed the blue Distress Stain, some purple and the Distress Oxide spray through it. This gave a subtle floral effect. Micro Glaze will take a bit of color after you heat(-dry) it, which is why several of the dots in the end were colored after all.
For the second tag I used the same technique, but with only one stencil and with slightly different colors.
That concluded round 1, leaving me with two nice base tags. On to round 2 below!
Round 2, resist spray: To prepare for what I’m calling a ‘stencil reverse’ technique, I sprayed both tags with Distress Resist Spray entirely and let them dry.
Round 3, paints: for this ‘stencil reverse’ technique – which I learned by watching one of Tim Holtz’s demos – I covered an area of each tag with Distress Paint. I then placed a stencil over each (wet) area and removed thepaint through the stencil with a damp paper towel – leaving the thin blue lines you see on both tags. With a normal stencil technique these of course would have been masked on your project, but now they are the only lines showing. A great and unexpected technique which may resemble a monoprint but isn’t one!
To add an extra color accent I added some Maya Gold metallic paint in a gorgeous dark purple called Aubergine, using a different stencil for each tag.
I was now ready to declare my two backgrounds finished, but then I noticed a small uncolored spot on the right edge of the left tag, which bugged me to no end. It seemed I had apparently touched the tag there with some Micro Glaze still on my fingers – adding a resist.
So as kind of a PS, I took a Distress Ink pad and blended a whole lot of ink over it so as to force-cover it up. It only partially succeeded of course, because of the resist, but at least the spot didn’t bug me anymore 🙂
Now my backgrounds were truly finished – and ready to be used in some creative way in a future moment!
Sometimes one has to go and broaden one’s horizons. So, I decided to not only watch all of the Tim Holtz demos on his blog, sitting on my couch consuming content (and pork rind chips 🙂 ) but to treat them as an actual course. He has shared many hours of demo videos since the corona lockdown and I treated myself to them all, taking notes in a notebook – I even dug out my fountain pen for that 🙂 . Being locked down at least supplied me with those hours so I decided to take advantage of that…
And so I started to practice and play around with all of the mixed media art supplies I had collected the last couple of years, but simply hadn’t come round to using. And of course I added to said stash with a lot of new stuff too, but hey, we’re not just crafters, we’re also collectors right 😉😎
Anyway, I thought it might be nice to share my first batch of mixed media backgrounds. I mean, I have done some inking & stencilling when creating photo tags for my envelope folios, but not in all of these different ways. This blog post will share the whole batch, and also the card I created from one of those backgrounds. The coming days and weeks I’ll post each individual (set of) background(s) in a separate blog post, with pictures and descriptions on how I created them. And after those, there will be more!
Hope you’ll enjoy this new series of experiments, that will be added to (but not replacing) my other work. Who knows where this will end – there may even be an art journaller hidden somewhere inside me yet…🙃🤨
