Continuing with my experiment of spraying Color Bloom mica sprays on black, I took a different stencil, cut a large tag in half and sprayed with three colors on the first half.
This left a lot of ink on the stencil of course, so I turned the stencil upside down and laid it onto the other (clean) half of my tag. Then pressed firmly with a piece of paper towel to immediately catch all of the ink leaking through, and lifted the stencil.
Top: monoprinting; Bottom: regular stencilling
The effects were different when I tried a different stencil! With the first, the stencilled half was clear, and the monoprinted half more murky. With the second, it was the other way around! I think the type of pattern had something to do with it; the second was more intricate than the first.
Top: monoprinting; Bottom: regular stencilling
These are still only backgrounds of course, we’ll find out what use I’ll find for them in some future moment. 🙂
The difference between a mask and a stencil is, in my own words, that one is the ‘negative’ of the other. What is blocked by one, is open in the other. Both have their merits and advantages of course, and since I had never tried a mask before, I was curious about its effects.
I only have one large masking stencil in my possession at the moment, and it is one by Studiolight. It is large enough for an A4 (or US Letter) size, which also makes it perfect for the giant #12 craft tags by Ranger.
My craft tags were black, and I already knew from an earlier experiment that the Distress Oxide colors by Tim Holtz were not my preferred sprays when used on black. They show up quite clearly, but they seem to loose much of their actual colors and everything turns a very pale pastel.
So, I dove into my stash to see what else I might use, and rediscovered my Color Bloom sprays by Prima Marketing. These are inks with mica-based dye, so they not only show up on black, but add some nice shimmer as well. And although there was some loss of color here as well, it didn’t bother me as much, thanks to the nice metal sparkle the mica brings.
For my masked tag I chose the most industrial colors I could find in my stash; which weren’t many for I only have about 7 or 8 sprays. So I chose three shades of purple and one bronze. The effect was stunning, better than I had thought! And on a black substrate an industrial-themed mask is of course perfect, since its pattern will show up in black.
The most important disadvantage to the Color Bloom sprays is their price – as far as I have seen these are the most expensive on the (craft) market. A second, minor issue I have with them is their enormous nozzle, which makes them ridiculously difficult to store in any kind of efficient way. They just take up too much room. However, this is only a small point, I would definitely buy some more – except they’re not being produced anymore! I don’t know why but Prima Marketing seems to have quit this product line; perhaps they didn’t sell as well as they hoped.
However, I’ll definitely keep using the Color Blooms I already have, every time I want to spray something onto a black base!
In fact, I’ll show you another Color Bloom experiment next time, when I try my hand at some monoprinting! 🙂
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…🙃🤨
