Kill Your Monday Blues with Hils Hints: All Things Distress Part 5

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All Things Distress

Part 5 

Distress Inks, and why they are so special

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Hopefully you’ll have been having fun with various blending techniques over the past few weeks – how about a bit of stamping now?  Specifically, faux watercolour stamping.  This is another surprisingly easy technique, and makes it look like you have spent ages crafting a watercoloured work of art when in fact it only took you a few minutes!

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What Do You Need?

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Watercolour paper or card stock

Distress inks – I have used Broken China, Chipped Sapphire, Forest Moss and Stormy Sky

Ink blending tool and foam

Spray mister

A stamp.  This one is a much-used Hero Arts favourite

A heat tool (optional)

A craft mat (optional)

{Items can be purchased at Scrap-n-Crop.com HERE}

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Instructions:.

Firstly, if you don’t have watercolour paper, you can use normal matte cardstock.  But watercolour paper gives a nicer effect.

Take your stamp, and colour it using your chosen distress ink colours.  I just dabbed the broken china and chipped sapphire fairly randomly onto the flower area, and coloured the stalk with forest moss.  

Make sure you go from light to dark colours to avoid contaminating your ink pads.

Spray your stamp with water to allow the colours to spread out and blend together.  Don’t use too much water, you’ll drip it everywhere!  But make sure you use enough to wet the whole stamp.

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Stamp the image onto your watercolour paper, lifting the stamp back off the paper straight away.  You can stamp another time, possibly even twice, without re-inking or re-misting your stamp.  The second and third images will be much lighter, but still noticeable, and give a lovely subtle effect.

Dry the image with your heat gun.  You can let it dry naturally, but the image will be more blurred.

Cut or tear the image to the size you require.  I’ve done a bit of both!  Using your blending tool, blend around the edges of the image to add some extra colour.  

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If you have any questions, either about distress products or anything else scrappy, just leave a comment and I’ll do my best to help you.  See you next week!

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Handy tip

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Inky fingers?  Wash them with some cheap shampoo, it should get most of the colour out.

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