Distressed Cards

I have been playing with Tim Holtz Distress inks for the last two weeks. I am hooked. I really love all of the unique techniques you can use with these inks. They react with water and stay wet longer then traditional dye inks. I have purchased all of the colors carried at our local hobby stores, they were on sale this week. I also have a few more colors on order so there will be more to come.

For this Diva card, I laid down a coat of Fired Brick and Worn Lipstick Distressed Ink on my craft sheet and spritzed with water. I dipped the white cardstock into the ink, making sure to get the whole card covered with ink. I repeated this process three times, drying my paper with a heat tool between each coat. All of the stamped images on this card are from the Stampers Anonymous Tim Holtz Visual Artistry Collection. All of the images on this card are from the Regal Flourish set. These are awesome stamps the stamps are thick and give a great impression.

I stamped the wing image with Black Soot Distress Ink and then brushed Perfect Pearls in White while the ink was still wet. I then spritzed with water. When I was happy with the effect from the water I dried it again using my heat tool. I got this technique right off of Tim Holtz website, he had a great video that shows this technique. I then stamped the flourishes in Fired Brick. The image in the lower right corner is a rampant lion stamped with Black Soot and the embossed with Rouge Zing! embossing powder. It is very subtle but I really like the distressed look. Since these are still dye inks they have a short working time. This short working time means that your embossing powder with not have quite the sticking power as you see with other inks, i.e. Versamark. For distressed project this gives a great look where the ink color will show through the embossing powder. I went back over the edges of the red stamped piece with Fired Brick and then Black Soot just on the very edge. I lightly sponged over the lion image to knock-down the gloss on the embossing powder.

I finished off the card with the red cardstock accent, the punch I used is from EK Success and is called Moroccan Lace. I used my Quickutz Revolution to cut the "diva" from red cardstock using the Magnolia alphabet. I lightly aged both red accents with more Distressed Inks. I mounted this to a piece of chocolate cardstock and then that to a vanilla card.

Can you tell that I really like the wing image?? I started with a white piece of cardstock. I applied ink directly to the cardstock, I used Vintage Photo, Peeled Paint and Broken China Distress Inks. I used a Stampin' Up sponge that I cut into quarters to apply my ink. Once I was happy with how that looked I took a paint brush dipped it in water and flicked this water on to the card. As you can see the ink travels away from where the water hits it. When I was happy with the work that the water had done I dried the sheet with my ever faithful heat tool. I probably should mention that this heat tool once took a violent trip down my stairs and bounced off the wall and it still works. I don't recommend treating your craft equipment like this but in all fairness it was an accident.

I inked up the Eiffel Tower collage image from the Stampers Anonymous Tim Holtz French Market set with Broken China on the top and Peeled Paint on the bottom. I stamped this on the left-hand side of the card. I stamped the diamond pattern with Vintage Photo and then the crown image from Regal Flourished also with Vintage Photo on the lower right-hand corner. The next step was to stamp the wings, I used the same technique that I used in the Diva card, but I used Walnut Stain to stamp the image and then Copper Perfect Pearls on top of the wet ink. I very lightly spritzed the image with water, then it was heat set. I mounted this to a chocolate piece of cardstock and then mounted the whole thing to a vanilla card base.

So the next card for today is something that is very different from what I normally do. I still couldn't tell you if I like it or not, but here it is. I love the distressed look but the colors are very non-traditional for a distressed look. The flash washed out the colors a little, I may try to get another photo of it.
I inked up the background image from JRL Design with Versamark and stamp on Eggplant Envy cardstock from Stampin' Up. I then embossed with a lime green embossing powder from My Sentiments Exactly! (They call it Pastel Green, but it in no way a pastel) I stamped the Fleur-de-Lys in the same manner, the image is from Inkadinkado. I cut out the image and mounted to Archiver's green cardstock and then cut that out again. I cut bellybands from the purple and green, both are stamped with a flourish from the Tim Holtz set I mentioned in the Diva card. On the purple it was stamped with Palette Ink in black and on the green it is in Versamark. On the green it is very subtle and you can't really see it in the photo - but I promise that it is there. I stamped Dream from Fancy Pants on the green in purple. The Fleur-De-Lys is mounted with SU pop dots. All of the images have aging on the edges with Black Soot Distress ink. So as I mentioned I cannot decide if I actually like this card or not but there was just something about it that made me post it.