Sunday, March 25, 2018

Distress Oxide Inks - I'm hooked!

I bought a few Ranger Distress Oxide Inks a few months ago, but hadn't experimented with them much.  Since I already enjoyed using distress inks, I KNEW I wanted to do more with the oxides.  So, I've been watching videos by Jennifer McGuire and Kristina Werner to learn as many techniques as I can.  A few weeks ago, I attended the StampScrapArtTour.  The Ranger booth had so many more colors of oxides, than I can find locally.  I took advantage of the opportunity and picked up a WHOLE lot more of those inks.  I also bought the Tim Holtz glass craft mat.  After using my new inks and the glass mat all of yesterday afternoon....I'm hooked.   These inks blend like butter and look so soft, but yet rich.  Wow!

For three of the cards I'm sharing, I used techniques that I learned from videos by Jennifer McGuire.  HERE is a link to her YouTube channel.

I used ink blending over heat embossed images on this first card.  After blending the ink, I painted the leaves and flowers using just water.


For the next two cards, I blended several colors of distress oxide ink onto a card stock panel, then spritzed a stencil with water and placed it onto the inked panel.  I pressed and held it in place for a minute or two, to wait for the water to be absorbed into the ink.  The result is a "lifting" of color where the stencil was placed.  It's subtle, but very pretty.  You may have to click on the photos to get a larger view.  It's much prettier in real life.


This was such a fun technique and much easier than I thought it would be.  I looking forward to doing more of this!

My last card today is much different than the previous cards.  For this one I heat embossed my image using clear embossing powder.  Then, using a water brush, I colored the image with distress inks.  Just smoosh some onto a craft mat and pick up color with a wet brush.  I rarely color on black card stock, so this was quite an experiment for me.  It's something I might have to play around with a bit more, to see what else I can do.
Well, now you know how I spent my Saturday afternoon!  I had planned to host a crafting day at my home yesterday, but the snow storm that was forecast changed those plans.  Thankfully, we didn't get any snow.  That was a very NICE surprise!

Thanks for stopping by!



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