Distress Ink Watercoloring

I posted an in-progress photo of this card on instagram a few days ago and mentioned that no matter how many amazing coloring mediums I discover, distress inks will always be my first love and it’s SO true.  Don’t get me wrong…I love my watercolors, copics, and colored pencils; but distress inks are just SO much fun!  Don’t believe me?  Let me try to convince you! 😉

*Sigh*…rainbows just make me happy! 🙂  I started by stamping the beautiful Emma background onto watercolor paper with versamark and heat-embossed it with white embossing powder.  Next I smooshed distress inks onto my craft mat, wet my watercolor paper, and watercolored the panel.  I added several layers of color and dried each layer with my heat gun.

After I was happy with the saturation of color I flicked water onto the panel and then blotted it off after 30 seconds.  I trimmed down the panel, adhered it to a white card base, and then added spectrum noir clear sparkle all over the stamped design.  Finally I adhered stick-it adhesive to the black cardstock, die-cut the Hand-Lettered Greetings sentiment and then adhered it to the card.

One quick trick…when you have an intricate die like this one sometimes when you run it through the machine you’re left with lots of little fuzzy bits sticking to the die.  You can spend hours trying to remove all of the bits with a nail file or tweezers (like I sometimes do) or you can adhere it the card and then firmly wipe it down with a swiffer cloth.  This seems to work best when the intricate die is firmly attached with stick-it adhesive.  The die doesn’t move at all and the swiffer cloth easily cleans up all those annoying fuzzy pieces.  See?  Nice and tidy! 😉

Oh and I added a little spectrum noir clear sparkle to the die-cut word, too!  You can never have too much sparkle!

Thanks so much for visiting today and have a fabulous weekend!!

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