Hi everyone, I hope you had a great Easter. I'm back to work tomorrow but before that I can finally share with you my video tutorial on how I made my recent card using Bubble Tilda.
The video is below, but first here is a list of materials and equipment you'll need to recreate this.
Equipment
Bone folder
Die cutting machine suitable for cutting large dies.
A blending tool or small sponge.
Scissors
A Bow Easy or similar bow tying tool, (unless you can tie good double bows by hand).
Glue Gun (or you could use a crafters glue).
Pokey tool or toothpick (if you're not using self adhesive pearls)
That's all for now, I will be working on the next part of my Distress Ink Colouring series next weekend, and will be moving onto colouring clothing, so I hope to have that ready for you in a week or two.
Hi everyone, I hope you had a good weekend, and for Mother's in the UK, I hope you had a great Mother's Day.
Today I'm bringing you part 5 of my Distress Ink Colouring Tutorials and this one is about adding detail, texture and definition to hair, using the pen nib end of the distress ink marker.
This is a completely optional step, but one that I often do.
So after we add the detailing your image should look something like this
(apologies for the poor quality of the picture, I didn't have time to take one before scheduling this post, so I just lifted one from the video. I'll add a better quality photo tonight when I get in from work)
The video will take you through it step by step, or you can visit the YouTube video directly, by clicking on the link here.
I hope you find this video helpful, I have more video tutorials to share with you in the following weeks, including colouring black hair on Canson Montval paper, colouring clothing, and how I make one of my cards (including a speed clolouring of the image), from start to finish.
I also plan on making videos on colouring curly hair, animals and backgrounds.
Thanks for taking the time to visit me today and if you don't already follow me I would love it if you would do so and not miss any of my posts.
Hello everyone! Well I finally managed to finish editing my tutorial for colouring hair with distress inks. Sorry it's taken me so long, it's been a bit of a learning curve learning to use the YouTube video editor, but I've learned a lot and recently downloaded a trial version of some video editing software so that I can edit first before uploading which should mean a faster upload time and quicker viewing.
For this video I'm showing you how I colour blonde hair and add shadows and some depth. In my next tutorials I'll be showing black hair on Canson Montval paper, and also how I add extra definition and texture to both the blonde and black hair, and yes don't worry I will be covering how I colour clothing as well, I won't leave her unfinished.
The image I'm colouring here is May, from Saturated Canary. You can find her in Krista's shop but I warn you you'll be tempted by many others just saying !
My video can be watched below or you can watch it on my YouTube channel here
Hope you like it and find it helpful!
You can find the first 3 videos in the series by following the links below
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
Hi everyone, I hope you're all having a great weekend. My back is feeling quite a bit better, thank you to all who wished me better.
Since I couldn't really do too much stuff around the house last weekend, I decided that it was a good time to make a start on those colouring tutorials that I promised....ohhh months ago now.
Today I'm not delving in and showing you any actual colouring technique as such, but I am going to go through everything you'll need to start, as sometimes people jump right in and don't have the correct equipment they need, end up very disappointed with the results they get and then tell themselves that they can't do it.
Honestly, I think that distress ink colouring can be learnt by anyone.
Before I start I just have to say that the way I colour is what works for me, it may not be the same as other people do it and that doesn't make other ways wrong, you have to use what works best for you. My advice it to learn the basics, look at the various different techniques that people use, and then practise lots, until you find what you like best and what you feel most comfortable with.
So lets start. I've made a video of this too, for those who prefer video tutorials and I'll link that at the end.
So....what materials will you need?
Obviously you will need your colouring medium. In this case since we are using Distress Inks, you will need either
Distress Ink Markers (this is what I mostly use)
Distress Ink Pads
Distress Ink Refills
For myself I have some of each, but I mostly use the markers and I have the full set. Why? Because they are cheap, easily portable, easy to store and in my opinion the most versatile to use. (We'll go through that later).
If you already have some pads in the right colours, you may wish to start with those to save money buying others, and in fact this is the way I first started colouring in DIs to try it out with little additional cost.
Paper......your choice of paper can make or break your colouring. There are many watercolour papers out there, everyone has different favourites or what works best for them, but I can only comment on what works best for me.
When choosing a paper there are many things to consider. Smoothness, whiteness and absorption.
A Hot Pressed paper will be smother. This doesn't really matter that much when it comes to the end result as you have to get pretty close to notice the difference in my opinion, but if you are using rubber stamps as opposed to digis, it's easier to stamp on smoother paper (no surprises there). The other options are NOT and Rough, which are Cold Presed. You will not want to use Rough.
I use two types of watercolour paper.
Langton Hot Pressed
or Canson Montval
The Langton is smoother and whiter. However it soaks up the ink really fast, so it doesn't give as much time for blending. You won't want to use a pen to paper method with the Langton HP. It's harder to erase mistakes also as you can't blot or 'lift' the inl so easily. However it does give a beautiful smooth finish and it's easier to get fine detail with the Langton HP.
The Canson Montval is not as white and a bit more textured (it isn't heavily textured though). What it does have is a special coating that means that unless you drown it with water, it doesn't soak up the ink as fast, giving you plenty of time to work and correct mistakes. It's also easy to 'lift' too much colour or blot out if you have slipped over the lines. It's the only paper I would use the pen to paper method on. It's a bit harder to find in the shops than the Langton (which is available in many places) and I generally buy mine through Amazon.
This is the paper I would highly recommend for beginners and is also my paper of choice if I don't have a lot of time and need to colour something up quickly. Downsides of the paper (apart from the marginal ones of colour and smoothness) is that because it doesn't soak the colour up fast you have to be careful not to use too much water or you'll wash everything out and it's not as easy to add small details as the colour blends out so easily.
I would recommend buying the smallest pad of each and see which you prefer, or if you can beg a few small pieces of a friend that would be even better. Once you have decided which you prefer, buy the biggest size pad you can afford as it will work out cheaper.
Brushes.
Ideally you'll want Sable, but they can be quite expensive and synthetic brushes also work well. I would however advise buying proper artist grade water colour brushes as you will not get a great result with cheap brushes. You do not need lots. I mostly use a 00 and a 000, though I usually switch to a 0 or a 1 for backgrounds just because it's faster.
You'll need something to keep your water in, this can just be a glass or mug or any container of your choice as log as it's clean.
You'll also need something to put your ink on, such as an acrylic stamping block, but you can also use anything that won't absorb the ink, such as the acetate that comes with your rubber stamps, or a CD case etc.
Other than that you'll need some absorbent paper such a kitchen roll to blot your brushes wipe excess ink on, and a clear space with good light. I prefer to colour by the window if possible to get good natural light, but as I'm often colouring in the evening after work, I find a good daylight lamp, or using a daylight bulb, is more comfortable and accurate to work under.
I won't cover techniques here, but I will list the colours I mostly use for hair and skin as this is what we will be starting with, so that you can get your supplies in.
For skin my colour of choice is Vintage Photo. You can use Tea Dye if you prefer a lighter finish, or a combo of Tattered Rose and Vintage Photo, but I find that the Vintage Photo give great shadows and if you keep a light touch and blend well, you can fade out to white for the highlights and won't need to use another colour.
For blush or lips it really depends on my chosen colour scheme, but for the purposes of these tutorials Victorian Velvet works well.
For hair, we'll start with the most common Antique Linen and Walnut Stain which will give you light and dark blonde and also light to medium brown. Hickory Smoke and Black Soot are great for black hair and also for white and black clothing etc.
Any of the green or blue shades would be good for eyes, but we can also use the same as we use for hair to cover hazel, brown and grey.
I hope you've found this post helpful, I will try and complete my next videos by next weekend for you, we'll be covering stamping your image and what inks to use and how to print your digis in Tutorial 1a, and then moving right on to colouring skin in Tutorial 2. I hope you find this useful and I'll be back next week with some more cards.
Happy Friday everyone, it's the end of the week, are you looking forward to the weekend? I usually am, but I've been on holiday this week and the weekend means it's almost time to go back to work lol. Sadly I didn't win the lottery while I was on holiday, so it's no idyllic whiling my days away in a designed to order craft room for me hehe.
I'd like to say a huge welcome to my newest followers, it's so lovely to have you with me and also big hugs to my loyal crew who've been with me a while, I haven't forgotten about the Candy I promised, it's just taking me longer than I thought to decide what I'm getting to put together my package, but I'm almost there, just need to order a few bits, so hopefully should be ready to go for next weekend.
Also I've started on my promised tutorials, the first one is live today with this card, you can access them (well 1 for now and more to come) via the Tutorial tab at the top of my blog here. The one for today is for how I make my shaped cards as I've had quite a few questions lately about those :)
Anyhoo....enough of my waffle and on with my card, which is my DT card for the new challenge at A Creative Romance and that's Let's Get Sentimental. It's another easy one really, we just want to see a sentiment of some sort on your make.
My card today is actually my Valentine's card for the OH. But it's Valentine's Day today, so perfectly safe to share....not that he looks at my blog anyway lol.......FB of course is a different matter.
Now I'll come right out with it, I suck at masculine cards, they're not my forte....however...Valentine's Day by it's very nature is romantic and not very stark adn masculine. I did try not to go too girly, I did not use a single flower! and although my card has some pink, it also has a lot of blue...and some metal...and some lace...sigh, I guess I fail. But even so, I don't think it looks overly feminine...and I like it :) I used Maja Design papers from the Vintage Autumn Basics collection, links to products used can be found at the end of my post.
The image is a Saturated Canary one by the wonderful Krista Smith, isn't she gorgeous? She's a digi called On My heart, I just loved colouring her, especially that hair! I'ved tried distress inks to colour again, not perfect but I think I'm improving anyway. I used Tattered Rose and Vintage photo for her skin, Antique Linen and Tea Dye for her hair, Chipped Sapphire for her dress and a mixture of Worn Lipstick and Victorian Velvet for the heart. I used a very little Shabby Pink Frantage around the edges of the oval frame.
The sentiment is from a Whimsy postage stamp sentiment set. The key and lock are by Tim Holtz and were from my local Hobbycraft. The edges of all papers have been distressed with Walnut Stain DI.
I've had this jeweled heart in my stash for ages, it was originally lilac, but I've shaded it with a Copic Pen in BV 29 to match my colours.
Well I hope he likes it as much as I do, do pop over to our challenge blog and check out the rest of the Elegant Artisan's creations, they're stunning I assure you.
If you're joining in with our challenge this week (and you really should!) we have a great sponsor for you and a great prize:
Have a fab day everyone and I'll be back on Sunday with my DT creation for Totally Tilda. : ) x x
