Ink Blending for a Sympathy Card
Greetings from Michigan. Unfortunately I needed a sympathy card this week. I decided the card I wanted to make needed to have deer in it as he was a hunter and I wanted it to reflect him. I have a nice Penny Black set that have deer silhouettes that I thought would work well with a simple ink blending technique.
The supplies you need for this card are: white and colored card stock, silhouette stamps, dye inks of your choice, low tack tape, ink daubers, Versafine Ink, clear embossing powder, shimmer mist, acrylic stamp block or stamp tool
Start by cutting you white card stock slightly bigger than you need as we are inking a background. I almost always start with a bigger piece than I need, when I am making an inked background. I like to trim the paper down for clean edges when I am done. In this card I am using Bristol Smooth Card stock because my low tack tape was ripping all my other card stock to bits. I had even used my tape on my jeans before taping it on the paper to decrease the tackiness. I was happy with this choice because my inks blended much more smoothly on the Bristol than they had on my other card stock. I taped it so approximately one-third of the card stock would be inked.
The colors I chose were not your typical sunset colors but I wasn’t going for realism. I just wanted something slightly unusual. After I blended my ink I took my tape off. Big mistake! I ended up putting my tape right back on when I went to stamp my silhouette stamps.
I started with the brambles and added my deer, then placed my sympathy sentiment between the deer. Between each inking I ended up heat embossing with clear embossing powder and then adding another stamp. While you can stamp several elements at once and heat emboss them while everything is still wet, I wasn’t sure where things were going to end up so I ended up heat embossing after each stamp.
In the end my deer were floating in space so I found a little grass stamp from Art Impressions Watercolor Series and stamped some grass under them. I see lovely artists out there that can take a little brush and ink or a colored pencil and add shadows under things to “ground” their images. I am terrified to do this because I get this far and don’t want to ruin what I have made. The grass stamp is my compromise to help bring the deer back down to earth. In the end I framed everything with a couple of trees on either end.
The last step is trimming my card down and finding some card stock to match my ink blending for a mat. Everything was placed on a white 5×7 card blank. No pop dots, no dimensional tape. I wanted it simple and striking. A quick spritz with my shimmer mist to finish off because, well I just like shimmer mist and the card was complete. Thanks for stopping by today. Let me know what silhouette stamps you have that would work well for this type of card.
