Saturday, November 13, 2010

Holiday Card Idea #9

Well I really had fun playing with this card and I'm so excited to share the results. I wanted to use the beautiful angel image from Angelic Joy and I wanted to put her on a dark background that suggested a night sky.  One way to do this would have been to stamp on white and cut out the image. But here's what I did instead. I embossed the image in silver and then bleached out the image - and that's all I did - no extra colors! I got all the lovely shading by using more bleach in some areas than others. Actually I let it dry and then went back and re-did some areas. I think I did her hands and face 3 or 4 times. Each time I added a little more bleach it got darker in that spot, but just because it was wet.  Then it got even lighter when it dried. Here is part of the trick, to apply the bleach I used my Aqua Painter. The bristles on it are specially shaped to do detail work like this. I don't think it would have come out as nice if I'd tried using a regular paint brush. I do keep one Aqua Painter dedicated just for use with bleach but I DO NOT store the bleach in the Aqua Painter. Partly to avoid damage to the seal on the Aqua Painter but also because the bleach goes bad if exposed to light. You need to start with FRESH bleach!

I was so happy with this and the way the colors turned out on the card above.  The paper I used was Night of Navy  and it bleached out to something that was such a good match for Perfect Plum  that I used Perfect Plum ink and Perfect Plum paper as a framing layer.

If you try the bleaching technique though you do have to test the papers. I made a trade card once for convention and did bleaching on Always Artichoke. The papers were from 2 different packages and some of it bleached to a whitish color and the other package bleached to a yellow color.  Both looked good, just saying you have to test to see what happens. I did try the angel on Not Quite Navy  and got a much more yellow image with that.  That looks good too. It seems like it might be a match for Soft Suede - I just haven't had time to play with that yet..

The angel looked so great on the card that I had to make the rest of it really special too so I sprayed Silver Foil Smooch Spritz on the Night of Navy and sprayed Vanilla Shimmer Smooch Spritz on the Perfect Plum.  I also used the little snow flakes from the Confetti Stamp Set as a background around the angel and I embossed them with Iridescent Ice

Supplies:
Silver Embossing Powder
Versamark Ink Pad
Heat Tool
Iridescent Ice Embossing Powder
Silver Cord
Dimensionals
AquaPainter
Silver Cord

Stamp Sets:
Angelic Joy (Holiday Mini)
Confetti (Big Idea Book and Catalog)

Colors:
Night of Navy
Perfect Plum


 



I am here to help you.  Please call or email me if you have any questions about this card or anything related to stamping.  Let me know if you want to order any of the supplies for this card.  I want to be your demonstrator.  Your business is appreciated and helps to support this website.

--Katie

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