Tag Archives: Distress Paint

Making Arthur, a Colorize die-cut project

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In 2020 Tim Holtz started his so-called Colorize series of dies with Sizzix. These Colorize dies are meant for you to add layers of color to your diecut image, each layer being its own color.

It was quite the ingenious system, for each set of die parts comes with its own color code. For example, everything with code “1” should be dark brown, each “2” should be blue etc., helping you as a maker to put together the elaborately layered die-cut image designs.

I think the very first one of these was Arthur, the purple owl.

I have thus far crafted one owl-on-a-branch project, and I gave it my own twist of course: instead of using differently colored pieces of cardstock, I sprayed my own backgrounds on mixed media heavy stock and die-cut my pieces from those.

I actually made this project two years ago, in August 2020, but I just now realized I had never actually shared it on my blog! So, here we go, with a step-by-step semi-tutorial on how I made my card with Arthur, the purple marbled pink owl.

1. Made the building blocks: created enough inked/sprayed/painted backgrounds for the project, in the colors I wanted.

2. Embossed a wood pattern on the bark-colored one.

3. Die-cut the branches – which now also had some nice texture, thanks to the embossing.

4. Die-cut the owl pieces from the other papers, and sorted them according to the Sizzix color-coding. Although I made my own colors, the coding still helped me to know which pieces belonged together.

5. Chose some chipboard sentiment pieces and colored them.

6. Made a card background. It started as an abstract piece but then it became a moonlit landscape of sorts.

7. Following Sizzix’ color-coding, I glued each layer of the owl image to the background. Sizzix also has very clear video tutorial shorts on Youtube for each of their Colorize dies btw. I’ll embed the one for Arthur below these pictures.

8. Glued the piece to a black background, added the chipboard sentiment pieces and applied some liquid pearl along the edges.

Done!

I have to say it was a fun project, and the detail these dies provide by way of the ever-smaller layers is very cleverly designed. Look at those tiny claw pieces!

So yeah, I’ll have me some more of these Colorize dies by Tim Holtz for Sizzix and see what fun they’ll bring!

What about you, have you tried any of the Colorize die sets? Leave a comment and let me know!

Time saver! Using your own mixed media backgrounds

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I tend to compartimentalize my mixed media crafting: one day I do my spraying, inking and/or painting, one day I use my stamps, stencils & texture pastes, and lastly I turn it into a card or tag to send out or give away. This not only keeps it fun and practical, it also saves time when you actually need a quick card or tag.

Stash of art backgrounds

In this post I’m sharing several of these follow-up projects, starting with the finished background, followed by the final project. You can find the making of some of these backgrounds in previous blog posts btw, should you be interested.

1. Birthday tag

Just the art background
All dolled-up

2. Textured birthday tag

3. Alcohol ink on gesso birthday card

4. Black background cards

5. Printed close-up photo of above art project, matted on cardstock

6. Marbled Distress Paint on black card

Bored of your clothes? Paint them!

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Recently I decided to put some paints onto some shirts, because why not. Plus, let’s face it, plain shirts look boring in their original state.

I can highly recommend the Tim Holtz Distress Paints to customize any fashion items you have, since they were designed with fabrics in mind. If you know of other brands that are suitable for both papercrafting/mixed media and fabric painting, then please let me know in the comments!

I also played around with my green screen, and it all went a little overboard, so apologies for the ridiculousness of it all – but I had great fun trying 😁

Mixed Media Tag with Embossed Gloss Accent

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Did you know that you can use Tim Holtz’s Distress Paint as a resist? To create a mixed media tag, I used this specific technique. I also used clear embossing powder to add a glossy accent – and here are all of the steps to do it!

Step by step

1. STAMP with Distress Paint and/or use a stencil, to add an image or some random patterns. I did both. Use a light color of paint, like white, cream or a very soft pink. Let the paint dry.

Btw, be careful and immediately clean your stamp, for this paint dries quickly and once it dries you won’t be able to get it off your stamp anymore…

2. Color your tag (or any other piece of mixed media cardstock) by blending with different colors of ink. I used both Distress Inks (translucent) and Distress Oxides (opaque). Simply blend right over your patterns – for the paint will act as a resist!

3. Optional: add some extra, subtle background effects by blending through a different stencil.

4. Spray some kind of metal spray to add some sparkle. I used Distress Mica Spray in the color Tarnished Brass.

5. Once everything has properly dried, add a different layer: time for some stamping. Choose one or more images and/or patterns and stamp on top of all the previous layers. First I used a background color of Distress Oxide to add still more interest to the background, this was a script stamp. You can see it on the right side of the tag, on the upper half.

I then stamped the main image in black Archival Ink. This is an oil-based ink, which therefore does not react with or bleed into all of the water-based inks underneath.

6. Pick one or more pieces of your main image that you want to highlight. Cover those fragments with embossing ink – ideally, if you can, use an embossing pen, which gives you maximum control of where you place the embossing ink.

Then take a clear embossing powder and emboss your accent of choice.

Glossy highlight

7. Take some chipboard sentiment pieces and use the same inks to colorize them. Then stick them to your tag.

8. Die-cut a decorative element from metallic paper and add it to the tag. I used Metallic Confections paper by Tim Holtz, but any metallic (or holographic!) paper would do.

Done! Now all that’s left is to tie a piece of string to your tag 🙂

Hope this little step-by-step was helpful! Now go, experiment to your heart’s desire and play with all of the stuff in your stash 🙂 Let me know in the comments if you’re going to try some of the techniques I used here!

If you want still more inspiration, here’s an earlier post where I also used Distress Paint as a resist.

Four Tips for Last-Minute Christmas Cards

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For all of you who are anything like me and are in dire need of some quick, last-minute Christmas cards, I’m sharing four tips to create them!

In my previous post I already shared a step-by-step on how to make the cards in the above picture.

So to summarize: tip 1 is the regular papercraft way of card-making: create designs from cardstock, then mat each seperate part with design paper.

The next two pictures show tip 2: die-cut a sentiment or an image from specialty paper and stick it onto a mixed media background. Then mat on top of cardstock.

With holographic paper
With glitter paper

Here are the materials I used for both of the above backgrounds:

Tip 3: create a mixed media background, but don’t use it as a background. Instead, die-cut something from it and stick it onto some white cardstock. Clean. Simple. Elegant.

Tip 3: Mixed media die-cut on white cardstock

These are the sprays I used for these:

Tip 4 is of course a mixed media die-cut on a mixed media background. Add some glitter accents if you like.

Bonus tip: if you’re not a mixed media kind of crafter, you can use design paper instead! This will give you the same elegant and sophisticated effect, both on white cardstock and on design paper.

Now off you go, hurry up with those last-minute Christmas cards! 🙂

Mixed Media Tag: Using Paint as a Resist

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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

  1. Apply a relatively thin acrylic paint to your stamp, like Distress Paint. Or, use some water to thin your regular acrylic paint. Now, be very quick to stamp it onto an empty background tag, because once the paint dries on your stamp, you won’t get the paint off any longer, for it will dry permanent…
  2. Once the paint is dry, ink up your tag with some water-based inks and make an inked background. I picked the six colors of Ranger’s Distress ink you see in the picture above, and used a blending tool. Simply blend over the stamped parts: the paint will work as a resist for water-based inks, so your stamped image will appear through the ink! This works particularly well with darker colors of ink.

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.

Alphabet stencil: water-based ink is resisted by the cream-colored paint, so diamond pattern still on top. Script stamp: oil-based ink covers everything, and is NOT resisted by paint, so diamond pattern is covered by the script pattern.

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!

Creating a Mixed Media Card

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This week I wanted to show you how to create a mixed media card, using inks, grit paste and embossing glaze. So, I set out and created one on camera – or so I thought… As it turns out, my camera wasn’t recording at all during most of the proces! 🤬

So I started over and did another one, with the camera actually rolling this time.

Step-by-step proces

Card 1 – This is the one I intended to film but didn’t. I painted a background in three shades of purple. Added ink through both stamping and stencilling, then took a second stencil and added a translucent texture paste (in this case Ranger’s Distress Grit Paste). Then I colored the grit paste while it was still wet, by covering it with a transparent embossing powder (in this case Ranger’s Distress Embossing Glaze). When the grit paste had dried, I heat-embossed it to melt the Glaze. Heat-embossing is a great way to color your texture pastes btw. You can check out one of my previous posts to see more of that technique.

Card 2 – same steps but with different colors. (This is the one I actually create in the video.) Some small differences: I used some ink sprays (from Ranger’s Dylusions line) instead of paint to color the background, and I used two colors of Embossing Glaze instead of just one. I also finished it as an actual card, so I added a decorative die-cut and a chipboard sentiment and sent it off as a birthday card 🎉.

Enjoy the process video, hope you’ll find it helpful!

Two Tags: Inks, Oxides, Paint & Micro Glaze

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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!

Dabbling in Backgrounds

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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…🙃🤨