A lot of experimenting

This card was inspire by a video by Amanda Branston that I found on Lavinia stamps Facebook page. Amanda used Yupo paper and alcohol ink to create a wonderful background for her stamping. Unfortunately I have a few issues with my lungs, which puts me off using any substance that may affect my breathing.  Yes,  I know a lot of these things are low odour but just because they are low odour doesn't mean there are no fumes... it just means you can't smell them as much. I have come a cropper a few times using low odour products. So I am more cautious now. 

 I desperately wanted to create something similar so I thought |I would play around with re inkers and brusho powders to see if I could create something vaguely similar. Well , I am sad to say, I didn't create a background anywhere near as nice as Amanda achieved with her alcohol inks and Yupo. But after working my way through a whole block of watercolour paper, I did eventually produce a few backgrounds that were useable but still not what I wanted.

 My homemade gell plate was a bit cracked and dented so before I could do anything, I had to melt it down in the microwave  and pour it into a shallow circular container and leave it to set. Once it was fully set a daubed small amounts of various colours of ink and spritzed with water.  Then pressed the paper on top of the gell plate.  My first mistake was using too much re inker and too little water.  My second was using too much water and so it went on and on. 

 In the end I found mixing up a tiny amounts of brusho powders with a little water and adding drops of  three different colours to the gell plate with a pipet, then spritzing with a little water was better but still a long way from what I wanted.

Then kind of by accident, I created something that was fairly close to what I was aiming for.  See the header photo.  My gell plate was so mucky with the residue from previous attempts I couldn't be bothered to clean it properly as I'd almost lost the will to live.

 I just dotted some brusho mix on one side of the gell plate and pressed the paper on top giving me those lovely colourful watery marks in a peachy orange colour. The very pale peach on the opposite side is just the residue from the gell plate.

The green version didn't work out as well, but I decided to stamp on it to see how it turned out , the photo above doesn't do it justice the colour are much stronger in reality and I thought it was a little too dark and sombre so I splattered it with bleach. giving  a little more interest and  creating lighter patches.  I also added a gold rim to the edge of the circle using gold wax polish.

 I found this a difficult card to photograph , the colours are stronger in reality

 Using purple and black ink and the same stamps I used for the focal point,  I stamped the background on pretty peacock card stock.