Feeling Distressed !!!

Morning my lovelies, Tracy here with a new post for the 'A Sprinkle of Imagination' design team....

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