Fun with Distress Inks and a little Bokeh too!

Happy Monday!  Angie, here with a Design Diva Demo where I share a couple of ways to color with Distress Inks.

To color the butterfly for this project I took a scrap of Mixed Media paper,

stamped ink on craft mat and spritzed with water. 

 To create gorgeous backgrounds or your own designer paper swish paper through the ink and dry with heat gun. Swish paper through the ink a second time to get more coverage which will leave a bit of ink still on craft mat.  Don't wipe that away, that's the good stuff!  After drying a second time with heat tool, flip the paper over and tap with fingers to soak up the last bits of ink.  

Check out the gorgeous ink spots!

 After the Distressed paper was completely dry I stamped the butterfly, added a bit more color with Distress markers, blended with an aqua brush then realized that the fabulous distress background no longer showed! Oh well, I still have a good bit of this gorgeous paper to use on another project! 

I like to use this next technique when I don't wish to have my layer fully covered in ink. Stamp ink on craft mat, take an aqua brush and paint randomly on Mixed Media paper working rather quickly.

Thoroughly spritz with water and lift paper to allow ink to move and swirl then heat set.

I get a different look every time I do this.  For this project I repeated the above step again to add a little more color. 

After the layer was completely dry I stamped the butterfly and colored with distress inks and aqua brush, making sure that the edges were deeply colored but not overly concerned with the middle since in the final step I adhere the fussy cut/die cut butterfly.

The Bokeh effect is all the rage right now so I thought it would be fun to add it on this card. I first saw this bokeh tecknique used by Lydia on her blog "Understand Blue". You don't need a fancy template, all you need is an unused pencil eraser!!! 

Ink the eraser and stamp close to the image then without reinking the eraser stamp further away making sure that the furthest dots from the image have the least amount of ink.  It's ok to overlap them a bit too!

For today's project I used the gorgeous stamp set New Creature that is part of March Sweet Perks Club Bundles.

Check out all the info on the March Sweet Perks Club Bundles HERE!