Two different kinds of messy to look at today: Ink, in the pad form and in the mist form. I will say that although Ronda has taught me much about misting, like to use a pizza box lined with paper towels to hold my layout and mist into, I have played with both products so much on my own now that I feel quite comfortable sharing examples with you. But it took me a while and a lot of mistakes to get to this point. I've made a lot of cards--the small canvas is excellent for trying out techniques (Ronda also uses tags for this purpose as well), I've recycled a lot of pieces of cardstock that just didn't work. And I've learned a lot. That's the fun thing about getting messy, you have to embrace your mistakes, make them work for you. It's OK to play. And you know what? I don't think she blends ink pads very often, I think I may have beat her to that technique. :P
Our first examples, using ink pads are the epitome of neat and controlled messy. I have a lot of ink pads. I do stamp on my layouts fairly regularly, but don't consider it to be "artsy." So how do I get artsy? One way is to blend your ink. If you'd like to see a tutorial on this technique, I made one a few years ago for Studio Calico.
Here's the resulting layout I made from the sample in the tutorial. It's a really fun technique, often the best techniques are ones you didn't mean to do.
Paula uses another artsy technique on the following page. She used a stencil and rubbed over it with a cat's eye mini ink pad to get her background. Ink pad=much more control.
Now to look at spray inks, known to strike fear in the heart of many a simple scrapper. I know I am not alone. You can go sparse like Diane did here, just a light layer of misting can give a soft effect, especially when you use a white mist on a dark background. The best way to get a light layer? Mist from above the layout, give yourself a good couple of feet between you and the layout. It gives the ink plenty of room to fall, landing softly on your layout. You'll want to protect the surface around your layout, newspaper works well.
Francine and Celeste employ a similar technique on these two pages. Screw off the mister unit and just drip your mist on your page.
Francine did it with actual liquid, Celeste again worked her magic with digital brushes. I shared this particular layout because she looks so dang awesome! Go Celeste!
The more you play with spray inks, the braver you become. I still need my misting to be controlled, but I can now do things like this layered effect with punched shapes. I randomly placed about between 12 and 16 butterflies, misted. I moved the butterflies to other random places, misted again. I did the same thing one last time. Cool effect, especially when you overlap the wings of one butterfly with a misted image of another. You can try this with any punched shape or border. It's really fun to try, you get great resultsf is you use similar colors and mist from higher up, like explained in Diane's example. (Recognize this picture?)
My fellow Emily, Emily Spahn did another form of masking and misting on this layout, I love the sunbeam effect she got by intermixing bits of misted sunbeam, papers, and journaling, it's gorgeous huh?
Or this layout with the entire background covered with intense misting. The mists blend much better than I expected as they dry, you don't see a hard line. To get this look, it's best to be pretty close to the paper as you're misting. A quick spray while moving along the page works well.
Here's another video tutorial I did for Studio Calico showing the technique in action.
Here's a layout by Ronda that uses the same technique, a solid squirt of each color of mist, close to the surface of the paper to get a nice strong color. Ronda is amazing with stencils, this shows her work quite well I think:
And should these all be more than you even want to think about attempting, there's always the fact that mist will change the color of most any embellishment to a different color. I do this all the time! The chipboard numbers, letter "E", and paper roses were misted with Maya Road's Fig Magenta. The yellow mums? They are really a silvery color but I sprayed them with Maya Road's Mustard Yellow. So easy to get a new color with nice rich dye inks!
I finish, hoping that today's post does not overwhelm, but instead inspires you to try out a few of these different messy techniques. Notice that my layouts are terribly messy? You can use artsy products in a nice and controlled way. That's what this week is for, except Friday...
