Altered Playing Cards Week 3

Another week has begun and another playing card challenge. I decided I was going to use the playing card challenges as a time to experiment and this week that is what I did. I was playing with backgrounds. Using distress ink and copper watercolor paint I got a neat background on the one card. Using Alcohol ink on foil created a stunning background for the other card. :-) Here are the my altered cards for the week.

For this card I coated the card with  gesso and placed torn pieces of wrinkled kraft paper into the wet gesso. This was paper that came in the mail as packing paper. I then lightly gessoed over leaving some of the original brown color of the paper showing but making sure that all the pieces were down tight.

I used a cotton ball and Peeled Paint and Vintage Photo Distress Ink. I also used an off brand yellow and Lady Bug Memento ink. After using the ink it still seemed like not enough contrast for the leaf and sentiment so I used Simply Art copper water color paint which I lightly brushed on. Then went back over with the yellow and Painted Peel ink.

I read a quote about leaves being full of color and light as they grew old and decided to modified it. The quote was done in Studio the software for my electronic cutting machine. I love how I can fill with gradient colors.  After cutting the sentiment out it was edged with Timber Brown Stazon ink.

The leaf is a print and cut. Because it is printed on an inkjet printer I knew it was going to fade when it got wet which is exactly what I wanted. I sprayed my leaf with Butterscotch Alcohol ink mixed in water. Crumpled the wet leaf up and then carefully unfolded it. Stamped using a Recollection music background stamp with Timber Brown Stazon ink.  Any music stamp would work.

If you look closely you may be able to see water drops on the leaf. Those were created by stamping the leaf with embossing ink and lightly sprinkling clear embossing enamel over the leaf. Then heating it up.It is a neat way to get the appearance of water droplets. I have not tried this with clear embossing powder as I don't own any. The lighter the sprinkling the finer the droplets will be.

I like dimension on my projects. The leaf was popped up on the card using a foam square. I also decided to leave the ragged edges of the kraft paper over the card instead of trimming them.

I was totally blown away with the way the background turned out for this card. After playing with pieces of kraft paper on the previous card I decided to see if a full sheet of foil would stick to the gesso. I discovered that a thick coating of gesso is needed for this technique.. I crumpled the foil and then smoothed it out. I pressed the foil into the wet foil making sure with my fingers that it was securely embedded in the gesso.

I have colored embossed foil in the past with permanent markers and Stazon Ink. However, when I saw that Claudine used alcohol ink drops on one of her cards I decided to give it a dry.  I used Stream,Wild Plum and Butterscotch ink. I randomly dropped drops of the different colors and then used a cosmetic sponge to blot them.I was surprised at how fast the alcohol ink dried as I've had to wait for the markers or Stazon ink to dry for up to an hour.

I printed out my sentiment and edged it with Vintage Photo Distress ink. The pocket watch was a black and white image but I converted it to a sepia tone, I used a black Glaze pen to add dimension to the hands. It was also edged with the Distress ink and then popped up with a foam square. The steam punk image I also converted to a sepia image as well as circle cropped it as I did not want the whole image which was an advertisement. I also distressed it with the Vintage Photo Distress ink. I like inking edges as I feel it gives more dimension plus if a print and cut is not perfect. I learned this trick when I would cut things out by hand. Perhaps I could not get as close as I wanted when cutting.

Do you use alcohol inks? How have you used the inks?

Wishing you Happy Frugal Crafting till we meet again!