Here’s a fun idea for a New Home (or Welcome Home) card: send them a cute little home decor piece, by way of a 3D house which also functions as a tea light holder! 🙂
I’m sharing a video tutorial below, but first a photo tutorial with the steps to create this project. I used a die from AliExpress, but you could of course also imitate this by drawing a row of four houses yourself and fussy-cutting them.
And here’s the video tutorial, enjoy!
I already knew you could stamp over a painted or inked background. But what if you want to stamp a light color, like white or cream, and you don’t have opaque inks? You could stamp with paint of course, but what if you want that grungy blended color gradient effect? Stamping with (white) paint over an inked background would only give you clear and harsh boundaries between the stamped image and the background.
Fortunately there is a third way, which I’m sharing today in my blog. I got it from one of Tim Holtz’s demos by the way, so check out his blog if you want to see and hear him demo it.
Step by step
3. Now you can use regular ink, like some Archival ink, in a darker color to stamp other images over your background.
In the top right corner you can see I used cream-colored Distress paint, but this time not on a stamp but through a stencil. This gives the same resist effect when you ink over it with water-based inks. I even used water-based ink through an alphabet stencil over it, and the paint resisted that too.
The Archival ink I used for the large typewriter-script stamp on the other hand is oil-based, so it did cover the Distress Paint. This is a great and easy way to play around with layers of colors and patterns and add some extra dimension.
Below is the end result I reached – for now; some day I may add a sentiment or die-cut or some dimensional decorative element, should I decide I’m going to use it as a card and send it out. But for now I’m very pleased with it as is!
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 Paste as a color sealer
I created an Indian summer-themed background with this transparent glossy paste, using the following steps:
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.
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 the paint 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…🙃🤨
