Distress Oxide Water Painting

Hi there, I hope that your week is going smoothly andlife is treating you well? All is good here at Warts n All towers, its been a busy few days, our Young Roboteers course finished last saturday, our YR's gather one last time at Robot Day to race their robots and we're off being STEM ambassadors this week at a Home Education Science Fair as part of British Science Week and we'll also be taking K9 along to robot day.

As well as that I've been prepping for our first "Meet & Make" session that we're giving for a group of young adults later this month. The idea is they get to meet us and K9, see him in action and then they make an assortment of robot themed cards, I'm loving that my hobby and Simon's are starting to cross over.

I'm now on day 14 of Miserly March, boy is it ever flying by! At the start of the challenge I seriously doubted whether I'd be able to do it, but I haven't spent a penny on crafting since the 26th Feb, so a total of 16 days! I'm almost halfway through the month of March and thanks to my supportive friends and Simon I'm now confident that I can make it.

I've still be looking at craft supplies, some of my favourite companies have been launching some fabulous things, and I've still got my nose in pinterest, youtube and my favourite papercrafters blogs, but when I see an idea that catches my eye, instead of running off to buy the exact same products to make the project that takes my fancy, I'm looking in my supplies at what I have that can create the effect without spending money.

Last week I watched Jennifer McGuire create some gorgeous cards using a very simple but very effective technique involving Distress Oxide inks and water, a match made in heaven. I knew instantly that I wanted to recreate the effect myself but with the prep, birthday card making and all the robot stuff going on, I didn't have time, so it went in to my future ideas pile in my head.

Then this weeks Wednesday Challenge over on Victoria's Crafty Friends asked us to create either a 4" x 4" card or an ATC, my head saw the Lil'Inker 'Wreath of Roses' stamp and I knew from using it in the past that it was smaller than 4" x 4", and using it would mean I could play with the Distress Oxide technique that Jennifer had shown on her blog. Everything I used to create these cards came from my stash, and yes I know there are some mistakes, like failing to remove all the embossing powder residue for one. That said I'm happy with the final results the cards are bold, bright and beautiful.

I won't go in to huge detail about how to do the technique, I'll post the video of Jennifer's below so you can see her in action. I decided when I'd finished applying the water inside the flowers and blotting the access away to leave the paler background, that I wanted to add some secondary colour.

So I used some distress inks (Picked Raspberry, Mowed Lawn, Mustard Seed and Salty Ocean) on an acrylic block mixed with water to create a paint and I dropped that in to the areas I wanted to colour. Once that was dry I gave the flowers and leaves a coat of clear Spectrum Noir Shimmer Pen before finally adding my sentiment and some 'Morning Dew' Tonic Nuvo Crystal Drops.

I'd pre made my drops, I add them to the backing left over from 3D foam pads and make a variety of sizes and colours, that way they are ready to add to a project and I don't have to wait for the drops to dry. It also helps prevent the drops soaking up the colour from the Distress Oxides which happens if you apply wet drops to the design, something Jennifer covers in her video. I used gold and silver vellum for the backs of the sentiments that I picked up on sale from Hunkydory in February, I bought it exactly for the purpose of being sentiment shadows, it has a lovely shimmer, but sadly the photo doesn't do it justice.

As part of my experiments I tried using bleach on the Distress Oxides and they just don't react to bleach in the way that the original Distress Inks do, all that bleach does is lift the colour in exactly the same way that water does, whereas bleach on Distress Inks sees colour changes and differences. If you fancy giving this a go for yourself, then watch the video below. The technique is certainly something I'll be making lots of use of in the future, I've already had a rummage in my stamps and found some designs that will be perfect, I'l also going to try using the Altenew outline images from my sets, watch this space 😁