thinking of you |

Have I told you before how much I love Distress Oxides? They are so incredibly versatile and the colors are just fantastic! They are so easy to watercolor with that I find that I’m rarely using my traditional watercolors.

My Empty Nest Creations Watercolored Flowers with Distress Oxides This card uses two watercoloring techniques. The background was made using, as Kristina Werner says, ink smooshing. I added Worn Lipstick, Fossilized Amber and Abandoned Coral on a piece of acrylic and spritzed it with water. I grabbed a piece of Tim Holtz watercolor paper and placed it upside down on top of the inks and smooshed it around—Voila…an ink smooshed background!

After letting that dry, I stamped (and masked) several flowers from Simon Says Stamp’s Watercolor Friendly Flowers using Versafine Onyx Black Ink. Using a waterbrush and some more Distress Oxides (Worn Lipstick, Broken China, Wilted Violet, Seedless Preserves), I painted the flowers with a few layers of ink. I added some Black Soot Distress Ink to the flower centers.

I stamped the sentiment from Hero Arts Made With Love stamp set with Versafine Onyx Black ink. I knew that I wanted to use one of my new favorite papers from My Favorite Things Black & White Stripe 6×6 paper pad on the left side of my card, but I thought I needed a little more black accent to balance it out. I found a small stamp set by Simons Says Stamp called Merry Trees that had 3 small filled in circles. They were perfect. I placed various black dots around the flowers to complete the card.

I hope you like it!

Computer Signature

I have a limited collection of dies, so I’m always looking for new ways to use them. Since it’s feeling like spring here in North Carolina, I decided to use one of my most favorite die sets–Waffle Flower’s Pretty Butterflies. This is the card I made…

My Empty Nest Creations Multi Color Ink Blended Butterflies card

I started off by cutting the large butterfly twice out of some card stock scraps. I made two stencils because I knew that I was going to ink blend, and I didn’t want any ink transferring when I changed colors. To give the border a little character, I used Avery Elle’s Wonky Stitches dies. I was able to fit 3 butterflies onto my 4×5.25 piece of Bristol paper with very limited masking. For my ink blended butterflies, I used Distress Oxides in Picked Raspberry, Fossilized Amber, Salty Ocean, Seedless Preserves and Spiced Marmalade. The butterflies looked a little too muted for what I had in mind, so I pulled out my Zig Embossing Marker and outlined the butterflies. I stamped the sentiment from Hero Art’s Stamp & Cut Yes set, and black heat embossed everything.

I’m going to be honest here…I wasn’t very careful when I heat embossed. Black flecks were small but noticeable, so I had to somehow camouflage them. I just splattered some watered down black paint and now they look intentional 🙂

To finish it off, I matted the card front with black card stock and adhered it to a top folding card base using foam tape.

Thanks for visiting!

Computer Signature

Tag Archives: thinking of you

Watercoloring with Distress Oxides

Another Way to Use Papercrafting Dies