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!

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.

Glossy Background Variations

This is this month’s project for a card crafting workshop afternoon I teach on the third Saturday of each month in Leicester, UK. See my ‘about me’ page for more details.

Distress ink was applied to an A4 sheet of glossy card using a brayer: broken china, dusty concord and worn lipstick. I then cut the sheet into quarters and left one quarter as was [flowers]. The second quarter I sprayed with water and allowed to dry, giving a speckled bleached look [butterflies]. The third quarter I wiped some of the ink off with a baby wipe, before using a scrunched up vinyl glove to apply the same colour inks from the pad to the card to get a wrinkled look on a bleached out background [lily/gems]. The final piece was dabbed with a scrunched up moist baby wipe, again producing a bleached effect [tree]. Each piece was cut in half again (ie eight pieces from one A4 sheet). Images were stamped on with either black or opaque white Stazon ink, and matted onto bazzill cardstock. The tree foliage in this example was added after stamping the tree silhouette by dabbing ink on using the scrunched up vinyl glove (a scrunched up plastic bag or cling film would work as well). The gems on this occasion are dabs of Stickles glue in coordinating colours – but hotfix rhinestones or self-adhesive gems would work far better.

Tim Holtz configurations shadowbox

Here’s this afternoon’s work – lining and taping a small Tim Holtz configurations shadowbox. I’m aiming for the box to be filled with ephemera evoking Victorian times with a steampunk feel to it. Quite pleased with it so far, but found the tissue tape to be less adherent than I would have liked. Three of the boxes are lined with paper of my own making – using various Tim Holtz stamps and distress inks: I inked the stamp with the same colour pad as I then used to swirl colour on with foam application tool. The tone-on-tone gives it a nice aged look.