Paper Towel Printing – Distress Inks

I’ve carried on playing with my newly discovered technique, and thought I ought to try Paper Towel Printing with distress inks. Here’s a step by step guide:

Firstly, place your sheet of paper towel onto a glass mat or other non-absorbent surface. Wet by spritzing with water.

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 Then I spritzed with homemade glimmer mist spray – good to have a background colour. I think it also helps the other colours keep in their place… This one is Peeled Paint with gold perfect pearls.

[To make your own mist – take one dropper full of reinker and add it to a mini-mister. Add a small scoop of perfect pearls. Fill with water to three quarters full, replace cap and shake vigorously. Spritz.]

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Drop on ink from your choice of distress ink reinker – this is Faded Jeans.

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Spritz each of those dots with water until they start bleeding.

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Repeat with more colours – this is Spiced Marmalade.I also added Dusty Concord.

Spritz with water.

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Start printing! Lay a tag/paper/cardstock/ATC on the towel and smooth down with your fingers. You may see water squeeze out of the edges at first – that’s what you’re after 🙂 You’ll also find the colours start to spread a little more into one another.

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All of this from one sheet? Yup – and they are all double-sided as well. It seems that the colours stay pretty much where you put them, so this would be great to carry a colour theme throughout a tag book, or art journal, or across several pieces of cardstock for scrapbooking or card making.

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And there was still some left over to do my art journal 🙂

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Close up of the tags – they’re a bit blotchy still as I didn’t wait to dry them before sharing this blog entry with you! Lots of texture on some, lovely watercolour effects. Love it!

Paper Daisies

Apparently hospitals don’t allow flowers to be brought in any more. Presumably greenfly are in danger of spreading MRSA around as they don’t sanitise between flowers? Any how – this lead to a request to make some paper flowers to take instead. And here they are. Using the large daisy punch, I sandwiched a whorl of florists wire between two cardstock daisies, stuck down with Glossy Accents. The centres were then layered with yellow six-petal flower punch, then a brown cardstock one inch sun punch before topping off with a disc of Liquid Pearls. Some petals were scored with small embossing tool, others were curved by pressing around a narrow cylinder. Rather pleased with the outcome, and so was my friend 🙂

Paper Towel Printing – for art journals and backgrounds

I’ve been playing today 🙂  And one of the things I got playing with was a paper towel. I originally planned to dye it with acrylic paints/inks for decoupaging into my art journal. But one thing led to another, and before long, I’d ended up with what I think to be a totally novel technique – at least I haven’t seen it in all my hours browsing art journal techniques online. I’ll be calling it Paper Towel Printing, and this is the result:

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Red, White and Blue Shoe

This week at Passion for Promarkers, their 100th challenge is ‘red, white and blue plus a charm’. It’s taken a few days of mulling over, and an hour in the construction, but here is my card. I didn’t want to go down the flag route and remembered bowling shoes the last time I was at the ten-pin skittles alley – you know the ones… laces that are too long, and they feel like clown shoes. They fit the challenge perfectly. The charm laced onto the shoe is ‘live’ – bound to encourage a bowling aficionado.

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Cool Dude

Passion for Promarkers Challenge Week 99 theme: ‘for a teenager’. This DL sized card is my original design. The black base of the skateboard is wet’n’dry very fine sandpaper adhered to the card with Glossy Accents (a glue stick just didn’t do the job). The wheels and graffiti were drawn freehand, coloured with ProMarkers and given white highlights with white gel pen. The wheels are mounted on foam pads for a bit of depth.

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ProMarker Butterfly Card

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I’ve been busy this afternoon… I’ve finished this greetings card ready to enter into this week’s Passion for Promarkers Challenge (#93, ‘Bugs’). The butterfly [generic] is mounted onto a background [Personal Impressions Flower and Butterfly Background, PIRM002]. Both have been coloured with ProMarkers, and the flowers on the background have been decoupaged for depth. Paper Artsy Grunge Flower die used to construct the flower with Leone-Em punched shapes for the centre. Stamens were coloured with Gold ProMarker.

UPDATE: I was in the top five for the challenge 🙂

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Autumn Leaves Art Journal Page

I completed this double spread in my moleskine sketchbook art journal over the weekend. It uses my own art journal elements (the leaves) and the quote is from Albert Camus. Doodles are with Unipin fine line pigment pen. Background is blended Tim Holtz distress inks on gesso.