Inkylicious Galaxy Splatters

A quick post from me before the year ends, I posted on my blog yesterday and on a few facebook groups some cards that I'd made using the Inkylicious Splatter Circle Background Stamp that I got at the NEC back in November, and a few people asked how I did the backgrounds believing them to be complicated. In fact that were easy peasy to do, the stamp does all the hard work for you!

I used distress inks in colour combos I like using, direct from the pads to the stamp and spritzed it with some homemade shimmer spray, but plain old water would do if you don't want a shimmery background. Then using my trusty Tim Holtz Stamping Platform I applied the inky stamp to the card stock and left it sitting on top of the card, pressing it down to make sure the ink and water mixed and swirled together. Once I'd done the coloured part, I repeated the process with Black Soot Distress Ink and then left the panels to dry.

I tried applying the colours in two ways initially putting bands of colour on the stamp with small gaps in-between (leaving gaps prevents your distress ink pads becoming contaminated with darker colours of ink), the water helps the inks to pool in to the gaps so you don't get actual gaps.

The other way was to move around the stamp randomly with a selection of colours and spritz. I like both methods but prefer the random application because it looks more natural to my eye.

You can of course apply more colour I think dripping direct from a re-inker would give more intense results, I'll try doing that soon and see what happens. All of the 6" x 6" panels (that gives you an idea of the stamp size) are now ready for me to turn them into cards, I didn't want the colours to be too dark because the stamped images I want to add will be dark and run the risk of disappearing into the background. It took me all of 30 minutes to create 8 lovely galaxy style backgrounds and that included the time it took to cut the 6" x 6" pieces of card. I can see this stamp making lots of backgrounds in the future and I'm going to try the technique on my Gelli Plates to create some square and rectangular versions. Now to turn these in to cards, I have several ideas, just need to turn them in to physical things!