Technique Tuesday - Color Layering

The Hero Arts Blog featured a really gorgeous inking technique today, and I'm borrowing it for this week's Technique Tuesday.  Shari Carroll is the artist who created this card, and she shows the technique she used on the post, as well as in a video. I really love the way this looks.  You may have done variations of this, as I have taught similar techniques in the past, but this is just a little different.  Here's the link to the technique video, which illustrates very precisely how to achieve this look.  http://heroarts.com/learning/technique.cfm?techID=159 .  And here's the card featured on the blog (another card is featured in the video).

Here's the link to the full article on the Hero Arts blog, which gives details about their current challenge, and info about the new images available now:  http://heroarts.com/blogs/club/2010/06/01/take-two-tuesday-with-sketches-and-more/ .  Hope you'll hop on over to check it out.

I had to try it, and here's the card I made with this technique.  I used a sketch from the Card Patterns blog challenge here- http://cardpatterns.blogspot.com/2010/05/sketch-66.html - for this card:

Here's the sketch from the Card Patterns challenge:

Hope you'll stop by the Card Patterns blog and try their sketch challenge.  It's fun, and a great way to get some card ideas.  Soon I will post an article on how to use card and scrapbook patterns. For now, just hop on over and give it a try.  You will soon be addicted!

I also used a button and flowers on it so I could enter it in the Secret Crafter Saturday Challenge over here:  http://thesecretcraftersaturdaychallenge.blogspot.com/, which was Buttons and Blooms somewhere on your creations. Check out their blog, also.  There are some really gorgeous design team samples, and if you click on the photos, it will take you to the person's blog, where you can see how each card was made!

Oh, and getting back to the Hero Arts Color Layering technique, if you are like me, you probably cringed when the instructions said to stamp the darker inked image into the lighter ink pad. Horrors....get my light green contaminated with a much darker green ink?!  You can probably feel me wincing even now.  Soooo, being the ever so resourceful one, I looked around my craft room for an idea to help me do this without getting my stamp pads contaminated.  Eureka!!! Right under my nose, literally, was my craft pad.  I keep it right on my work table, and do all my stamping and creating on it. It's where I rub markers to mix with water for watercolor, stick my foam tape to, mix my colors, etc. So, I simply took the lighter color stamp pad, dabbed it onto the pad until I had a nice heavy application of color, and used it as my "ink pad" for the second part of the directions, where you ink the image with the lighter color without removing the darker color. I got the same results, without soiling my ink pad!

Well, that's it for today. Glee is about to start. Hope you're having a wonderful week.

Blessings and peace,

lynda