17 April 2015

Feeling Distressed !!!!

Morning my lovelies, Tracy here with a new post....
Most of the art I do nowadays involves acrylic paints but having recently been on holiday and not being able to take my beloved paints with me I was forced to step out of my 'comfort zone' and experiment with other mediums. I loved the challenge of using things I hadn't used before and whilst the first couple of pieces weren't the best they did give me the opportunity to play and get a feel for the materials.....

Anyway this got me to thinking about when I started out with mixed media art and one of my favourite mediums was distress inks (of course I brought as many colours as I could afford) and how I hadn't taken them out and played for a long long time !!!!

So I decided to get them out and dust them off and see if I enjoyed playing with them as much as I remembered.....


I cut 3 ATC cards and a 7x5 postcard from a piece of 300gsm watercolour paper and started to add colours from the distress ink pads with a sponge distress tool. I used pickled raspberry, peacock feathers and mustard seed as my starting place.



For the postcard.....

I then used a Dylusions flower stencil and a Dina Wakley alphabet stencil to add interest to the background again using the distress pads and an inking tool. I used a small script stamp and stamped with black archival ink



I stamped one of the Dina Wakley's 'Face in the crowd' girl stamps directly onto the background using black archival ink and then coloured directly over the top using crayons blending with my fingers. 
I added some white acrylic dots, a sentiment stamp and then finished it off with some machine stitching. 



For the ATC's.......

I started with the same background process, layering the distress ink pads and adding some stamping. I then cut out hearts from some vintage French magazine pages and added to the cards



I stamped onto a scrap of card with the fabulous dylusions quotes stamps and coloured with watercolour crayons. Cut them out and added to the cards. To finish off I machine stitched around the edges and also around the hearts.



I had so much fun playing with my distress pads. The colours are amazing and so easy to work with...... I will definately be using these again very very soon !!!

I hope you are inspired to give distress pads a try and have as much fun as I did this week

Tracy
Xxx

7 comments:

Unknown said...

Absolutely fab!!! So much fun with ink pads and I almost forget about them!!

Craftyfield said...

Distress are a fabulous medium, mixing all these hues without getting mud, like you did on your ATCs, is the holy grail!

heARTistry said...

Thank you ladies. You are too kind xx

Caroline said...

You had a sewing machine on hols? Golly...
Ahh, distress inks, aren't they wonderful? I think with all the different mediums out there, we forget where we started out. Like you, I bought as many DIs as I could afford. They are so versatile & as Craftyfield says, don't turn to mud when blended. Your postcard & atcs are gorgeous! The layers you managed with stencil & stamping look great & extra texture from stitching. Tfs

Corrie Herriman said...

Gorgeous !
Corrie x

heARTistry said...

Thank you ladies. You are all very kind xx

Fuchsia said...

I love distress inks your fabulous colourful work look so warm and Happy x