Trends on Tuesday - An inky messy tutorial!

I know not all of you like to get messy....but I thought I would show you how I made my green inky background a couple of weeks ago - so bit more of a technique on Tuesday than a trend!

You need a water spray, some spray inks - I have Cosmic Shimmers Golden Mint, Peacock Green, Aqua Lagoon and a heat gun, though you can let it dry naturally but this will give it a slightly different effect - try it out!  I used an old pizza box to protect my surfaces and try and limit the splatter.

Start with a good spritzing of water across the page - don't completely soak the paper (or it gives you a different more watery effect - I like to have a few dryer areas so the splatter from the spray stays as it would do normally).  I think you can just about see the puddles and drier areas of the cardstock in the photo.

 When you have worked out where you want the inkiness to be (mine is mainly at the top of the page) then give a couple of spritzes of one of the lighter colours this is the mint green the water just helps the colour to run a bit more.

Then add some spritzes of the darker colours  - my paper had dried a little so

Add a few more spritzes of water over the top and you can see the colours starting to run into each other.

With the heat gun start to dry the page - you can push the ink around and make drips and darker areas, also with the cosmic shimmers you get a really nice mica sheen when it is dry.

As you can see my page is fairly warped so it is now under a pile of books, once the page is in your album it will flatten out anyway.  If you want to try it on a smaller scale for cards then watercolour paper would help it not to crinkle so much.

I hope you enjoyed that.

Katherine

Trends on Tuesday - Love a little Mist

I cannot contain my love of mists in one trend post, so there will be others! This page is a very misty page, and it all started because I had made a background with distress stains that I didn't like, so I needed to cover it up and so began the playing with mist and paint.  I started by covering an area in a cheap plastic table cloth and put my pizza box on top of that.

When you use the mists you need to mix in all the sparkly mica at the bottom of the bottle.  If you don't want to get bubbles in your mist tube which create drips on pages then you are not meant to shake the bottle up and down, rather spin it around or roll the bottle between your hands (having said that I have never achieved perfect misting with no drips whatever I do, but it doesn't worry me either as I like it). 

I used 3 cosmic shimmer mists to cover up my base sheet of card - Aqua Lagoon, Purple Violet and Peacock Green - this was a cream sheet of card orignally so there is a fair amount of mist on there.  Then I added a white paint strip down the centre.  I also misted and scrunched up some white tissue paper to add some texture to the background and misted some chipboard - if you paint the chipboard then the misting colours don't come out so dark so this is the unpainted side on my page as I preferred the deeper colour.  I also misted some lace and a piece of purple Graphic 45 Nutcracker suite that went really well with the colours, and some fabric buttons.  The final touches were to upcycle some old bits of metal - primarily curtain weights and a buckle.  This page was inspired by Finnabair's (Anna Dabrowska) strong use of mist on her pages with amazing effects so here is a link to her blog for some more inspiration.

From Pixels to Paper

Hi, Karen M here.  I have a confession - sometimes I go over the the dark side and scrap digitally.  Not so much now but there was a time, when I was on a digital design team, I scrapped extensively in pixels.   I still retained my love of paper scrapping and as I only ever stored my digital layouts on my laptop and never printed them out, would sometimes, if I particularly liked a page, convert it into a paper page for my album.

Last week, I was having a clear out on my laptop and came across this digital page I had made a couple of years ago and thought it would translate perfectly into a paper one.

I cut the frame on my Craft Robo (a very ancient silhouette) and that was my starting point.  I then sorted through my photos to find one that would suit the frame and off I went.    Once I had cut and punched out the remaining elements for the page from the new 7 Gypsies Trousseau range, I inked all the pieces with Pumice Stone ink.

 

I thought the background Kraft was too plain and so a few spritzes of watered down white paint and Cosmic Shimmer later

I was happy with the result.

Added a few buttons

 
and some Prima  flowers and I had a page that was made in an instant as I already had the digital version to copy.

and how fortunate that one of the papers had a shortened version of my daughter's name printed on it!

Do you ever go over the DARK SIDE?