Distress Ink Colouring Tutorial 2 - Preparing Your Image for Colouring

Hi everyone! This is the 2nd of my series of colouring tutorials. I know I said the next one would be colouring skin, but I thought before I did that I had better mention how to prepare your image for colouring with distress inks.

For those who like to see this explained in pictures, I've made a small video below, which you can access here or on YouTube.

So you have your equipment and materials ready, you've chosen your image to colour, now all you need to do is to get that image onto your chosen watercolour paper.

For rubber or clear stamps you are going to want to use an ink that is not water soluble. As you will be using water with your inks, you do not want your ink to run and smear.

There are a few inks you can use. Some people swear by Stazon Ink. I've never tried this myself, but to be honest I'm not keen on it staining my stamps and as I can be quite messy I prefer something that will clean off my skin or whatever. You can use Archival Ink from Ranger, this comes in several different colours. Also I know at least one person that uses Memento Ink, which I found rather strange as it's water solouble, but I guess if you heat dry it, it might be ok, I've never tried it. I have Memento ink that I use with Copics, but in all honesty I'm too impatient to wait for ink to dry overnight or heat setting it, I just want to get in there and colour lol.

My own personal preference is for Versafine Ink. Usually I use Onyx black, but it is available in quite a lot of different colours and I do occasionally use Vintage Sepia. It's water resistant ink, but stamps clean up with soap and water just fine, as long as you clean them pretty soon after use.

I use a standard size pad in the black, but this ink is available in small cubes also, which makes it quite cheap to try out.

If you are stamping on a textured paper, you will need to apply a bit more pressure than normal. If you own a Misti or something similar that allows positioning of stamps and over stamping, you may want to use this. Otherwise just be careful to press down with a firm even pressure and make sure you apply good pressure on small highly detailed areas.

By the time you've cleaned up your stamp, your image should be dry and ready to go.

If you are using a digi, you will first need to check that the printer your are using is using a waterproof ink of some kind.  Laser printers work very well for this and you can pick up a B & W version pretty inexpensively, that will allow you to print off your images for coluring without having to worry about ink bleed. I have used a Laser printer in the past and had very good results. Currently I'm running with the Epson Workforce

To print out your digi it's quite unlikely that your printer will take an A4 or A5 piece of paper as watercolour papers are quite heavy gauge. So what you will need is to get some low tack masking tape, or you can use stencil tape or washi tape.

First print your chosen image on plain copy paper. Then cut a piece of your chosen paper to slightly bigger all round (a quarter to half an inch.). Position your paper over the printed image and secure on 2 sides with your masking tape. Then run it through the printer Voila! Your paper should have no difficulty being taken up by your printer and your image should print perfectly.

You're now ready to colour your image, which I will colour in forthcoming videos.

Hope this has been helpful. Take care and I'll see you soon! :) xx