Pulled my photo boxes out and with the thought of being able to cut into the new You Are Enough papers, I was looking for photos with jewel tones. Have you seen these papers yet? The shinny is rose gold!
For as lovely as these papers are, the photos I pulled from the box just fit so nicely with this old Jubilee paper workshop layout (LO) that I will continue to wait to cut into the You are Enough pack.
One of the “photos” was really just a print on plain paper, so I backed it with cardstock and was able to use it to show more of the people that shared the day with me.
Here is the video that includes my thought process in fitting older photos with empty layouts.
I had a big pile of scraps left from my Christmas cards and started creating some cards from the pieces. At first I did a few and then decided I needed some flowers for embellishing. So I cut 20 flowers in blue belle, sapphire and whites daisy. I used my cricut to fussy cut the flower from the old Chelsea Gardens stamp. (C1709) Then to finalize the flowers I stamped them with embossing ink and heat embossed them with gold powder.
So now that I had a bowl of flowers I could dive into creating some cards.
The branches and gold leaves are all from the leftovers too. If you like watching process videos, here’s mine from these cards.
I have long admired those paper artists that are able to pull off mixed media or the grunge look and create something incredible. I struggle to put layer upon layer and hide most of what I did previously and I think because of that I miss the mark with these art forms.
There are ladies that create amazing cards with ink blended backgrounds and I have tried and I have been able to teach others, but my own work did not soar as others did. All that being said, I think Distress Oxides just might enable me to do some creating of my own!
Learning new techniques is a passion of mine and I have been told I dive into with scientific methods. So of course the first thing I did before even opening one of the distress oxide ink pads was to do some research. I watched youTube videos, read what Tim Holtz had to say about the ink and talked to my oldest child who is an artist.
Knowledge in hand, I dug out some paper, tools and a few different mediums to learn how this hybrid die and pigment ink, that reacts with water, would act with different preparations of papers.
I had received a nice set of watercolors for Christmas along with a Watercolor Ground. So I took the ground, borrowed a jar of Gesso from my in house artist and under the recommendation of my eldest grabbed a bottle of basic white acrylic paint. Taking these three mediums, I went about applying a thin layer to 3 different types of white cardstock. The YouTube video goes into more details.
I learned a lot. First, the watercolor ground prepares cardstock to be able to withstand water-coloring and allow more playing with the colors before the paper starts to pill and gives a nice texture to the regular cardstock. It does not however create a good environment for trying to achieve smooth ink blending as the texture works against that. The Gesso and the Acrylic paint however both made blending the inks easier and I felt like if I can do it, anyone can. Plain cardstock wasn’t as easy to get a seamless blend, but I did manage it.
Now that I had played with the distress oxides ink, it was time to see what water did to it, and then find ways to apply the water in different patterns. The card at the very top of this post is my favorite. I sprayed the back of a stencil and pressed it on the inked cardstock. You can see the details and I really like it. I feel it could be a gateway to adding more textures and layers.
I even got out my crimper to add some texture behind the feature imagine. If I would have thought of it, I should have ripped the crimped cardstock to really kick it up a notch! Maybe next time.
Here’s another card I did. I pulled matting cardstock and the stripe of yellow for the background along with the black cardstock scrap to balance the stamping of the flowers. This is one of the samples that was sprayed with water and created all the faded water marks.
I’m looking forward to creating more inked backgrounds and finding new color combination. What is your favorite thing to do with distress oxides? I would love to try another new technique!
After a year and a half of not scrapbooking any of our photos, I finally finished 4 pages in one day! I felt like I was a novice at first and it took me a long time to get back into the swing of it, but I’m happy with the results.
Not having access to all my supplies and tools has made me dig a little deeper into my bag of techniques. On this layout, I started with one of our how to pattern books a group of photos, and a pack of paper that worked with the colors in the photos. From there I added some homemade stencils, used some flip flaps, and just had some fun.
There is a video of me walking through the creation of these pages if you want to see more of what I did.
Back before our family moved to California, and then before the Coronavirus was an everyday concern, I hosted a free monthly crop. Ladies would come and work on their own projects during the day and in the evenings everyone would be given the materials for a project. Often the project was a card workshop, but sometimes we did home decor items or learned new techniques. We have all missed this, and I have started hosting zoom chat & crafts for everyone in my VIP group. (Got to Facebook https://www.facebook.com/groups/CraftingwithAmanda and request to join)
This month I decided we needed to try and do more together and I designed this card for our third Thursday chat & craft.
I originally designed this card for a color challenge and a scraplift challenge.
I used the August 2020 Stamp of the Month for all the background stamping. It was fun doing some random stamping again!
Do you recognized any of the shapes? They all came from the first Close to My Heart Cricut Cartridge, Art Philosophy. I think this card would be great for any occasion. What would you use it for?