Kill Your Monday Blues with Hils Hints: All Things Distress Part 11

All Things Distress

Part 11

Distress Inks, and why they are so special

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Today, we’re taking a look at the distress crackle paints, and using the most versatile one with distress stains to get a great look that is almost like stained glass.

 

The distress crackle paints come in 24 colours from the distress colour palette, plus three metallic shades (Antique Bronze, Brushed Pewter and Tarnished Brass), plus a clear one, Rock Candy.  In essence they do what they say – they provide a distress, crackled look to your items.  The crackled look isn’t anything new, it’s been around for a long time, but it usually involves painting your surface with one colour, letting it dry, painting with a crackle medium, letting that dry, and then painting it with a second colour which cracks as it dries.  The distress crackle paints take a lot of the hard work out of this – just paint one coat onto something, and you get a cracked effect – simple!  The paints also come with their own brush, attached to the inside of the lid, so you don’t even have to clean up afterwards.

You can use the paints by themselves, painting them on wood, chipboard, grungeboard, etc, and you get a nice crackled effect, all in one colour.  For added depth, and to highlight the cracks, you can rub distress ink or distress stains over the top, so that the ink colour sinks into the cracks.  You will need to wipe over the paint with a paper towel to remove any excess ink. 

 

Our technique today does this with the clear rock candy distress crackle paint, and several distress stains, to give a gorgeous effect.

what do you need?

 

A die-cut piece of chipboard or grungeboard.  I have used an ancient pre-cut shape from Maya Road.  You can use pre-cut ones, or cut your own.

Rock Candy Distress Crackle Paint

Distress Stains – I have used Broken China, Shabby Shutters and Dried Marigold, one of my favourite combinations.

A heat gun

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

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Instructions:

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Cover your die cut grungeboard or chipboard with a thick layer of Rock Candy.  The thicker it is, the deeper the crackle effect will be.  You can see on my photo that I put a lot in some places, but at the edges there wasn’t such a thick coat, and so the crackle effect isn’t so obvious.

Let it dry naturally. 

(This is one thing that you can’t hurry along with a heat gun!) 

This will take some time, usually an hour or two.

Apply different colours of distress stain to the crackled surface, letting the ink sink through the cracks.  Make sure you get the ink flowing before you start inking the crackled paint, otherwise the pressure may make the crackle come away from the chip/grungeboard.  (You can do this by just pressing the distress stain down a little onto a craft mat or scrap paper, this opens the valve in the bottle and gets the ink flowing.)

Once you are happy with the colours, heat the die cut with a heat gun for about 30 seconds or so to bake the stains into the surface.  You can tell when this is done, as it looks almost as if the ink has gone underneath the clear crackle paint.

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Handy tip

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For a brighter coloured effect, try this on white coated chipboard instead – the white behind the inks will make the colours “pop” a little more.  For darker, more saturated colours, let the distress stains linger on the surface for longer, so more of the stain creeps into the cracks.