Good morning and welcome back! What, surely you didn't think you'd have the day off just because it's give.away.day? With all the great momentum you got with Monika, we've got to keep on going!
Today we're talking about finishing touches: specifically distressing. I know all the clean and simple scrappers are probably shuddering right now, but never fear, there are varying degrees of distressing and today Celeste and I will show you how.
In my early days of scrapping I went through a major distressing phase where no product or layout was safe from the attack. Luckily I eventually learned that I could use distressing in subtler ways to finish things off. Here are some tools and methods you can use to add a distressed look to your work
2. Ink, specifically Distress Inks
3. Sanding
4. Scissors
5. Digital brushes
6. Predistressed products aka cheating!
On this quite messy page Celeste used a distressing tool as well as simply tearing the papers
I think we can all agree that if Celeste can do distressing, then we all can! As she herself said "If you know my style at all, you know I'm all about clean, straight lines. Here i tried to rough up the edges of the papers a bit - tearing some and using a distress tool on the others. Nothing is perfectly straight playing off the messy face in the photo!"
In my experience I found a pair of scissors to work very well for distressing. Open them up and run the cutting edge of one blade along the edge of your paper. The degree of distressing will depend on how hard you press while moving the blade.
In the layout above I used my scissors on both the kraft background and the green photo mat. When I moved the blade lightly I got a rough edge, when I moved it with more pressure I actually got torn bits in the paper.
I did the same on this page, but just on the edge of the paper flower
Celeste goes one better and used her fingernails to rough up the edges of the polka dot paper on this page.
Inking and sanding are other great ways to give a grungy look. Here I used both on this page to form a sort of "photo mat"
The cardstock here is by Core'Dinations and made for sanding. They come with a white or contrasting core that shows through nicely when the top layer is sanded off. You can use regular sandpaper or a tool like these files from BasicGrey. Once sanded I then ran my ink pad directly over the paper.
Here's another layout showing inking techniques used on the paper edges as well as to "age" the white flower embellishments
However if you don't want to get messy you can also get distressing effects using either predistressed products like the papers on this page
or do it digitally using distressed look papers or a distressing brush
Now you can to pop on over to the Ella blog to see what today's expert, Tammy Tutterow, has in store for you.
WORKOUT REWARD
What would a good workout be without a reward? You've worked hard sanding that paper and now your fingers are all inky too! Good for you! Wipe the sweat from your brow, take a deep breath or two, and head on over to the Ella store and drop this eBook in your cart.
Use the code HAPPYDESIGN tosave $1 on Design Workshop by Lisa Dickinson. Code expires May 15, 2011.
Don't forget to participate in the challenges going on at Ella Publishing through May 7th...fun to be had and prizes to be won...you don't have to be registered in the class to be eligible.
Thanks for joining me today! I'll be back tomorrow with even more training.
