Tag Archives: Micro Glaze

Stamping and Spraying on Coated Paper in Five Easy Steps

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Sometimes, when I order some of my card designs printed, the printing company adds one or two blanks. These are sturdy, completely white cards; they are also coated, for it is a form of photo paper. So it won’t react to mixed media like your usual assortment of craft papers.

I have created a card with such a blank before, using it as an easy base for design paper. You can check out my step-by-step video on that here.

This time however I decided to try out some mixed media techniques to create a card from one of these coated blank photo paper cards. Here’s what I did, and how it worked out.

1. Stamp and color an image

I chose StazOn ink for this, because that is suited especially for smooth, non-porous surfaces – like photo paper. I also colored the stamped image, using Tim Holtz Distress Markers.

In hindsight, that turned out not to be the best combination, for the StazOn ink reacted a little bit to the Distress Markers. So, my tip here is: IF you want to use water-based markers to color your image, then do NOT use an alcohol-based ink to stamp, but an oil-based ink like Archival Ink.

Stamp an image that speaks to you

2. Seal your image

If you’re going to spray a background, you’ll need to seal your colored image first, otherwise it will either run and wick, or it will be covered up by your sprays (depending on the mediums you choose).

I wanted to use Distress Spray Stains, which are water-based, and since I already used Distress Markers to color the image, I knew exactly how to seal it: with Distress Micro Glaze.

Simply dab your finger lightly in the jar, and rub it all over the colored image.

Side note: of course there are several other products on the market to seal your image. For instance, transparent gesso, or mod podge, to name a few. I’m simply mentioning the one I used. #nonspon

3. Spray your inks

Spray your entire card to your heart’s desire. Then remove all of the sprayed inks from your stamped image with a paper towel. Thanks to the Micro Glaze, none of the sprays will stick and will come off easily, without messing up the colors of your image.

Also, because my paper was coated, it didn’t really absorb the inks too well; there were several spots where the ink didn’t take, causing a great bonus effect!

The materials I used

4. Add special effects

I added some transparent medium to create a bit of a glass effect for the glasses: I used Nuvo Crystal Drops for this, but you could use several alternatives, like Glossy Accents, Paper Glaze or any other dimensional transparent medium.

5. Add a sentiment

Last but not least, I stamped a sentiment – this time with Archival Ink (having learned my lesson from step 1).

Alternatively, you could also go dimensional and use wooden or chipboard sentiment pieces.

And done!

Have you ever crafted with coated paper like this? Feel free to ask any questions, or to let me know what you think, below in the comment section!

Learning about inks, gesso & micro glaze

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This week I’m sharing something I learned about Ranger’s Distress Micro Glaze, in combination with Distress inks, gesso and Glimmer Mist: they don’t go well together. 🙃

So this was my process: I stamped with Archival ink on a card, but some ink accidentally landed on the lady’s face. I could have started over of course but I always like to try and fix things, for you learn way more this way. So I ended up putting some gesso on her face in an attempt to cover up the spilt ink. Perhaps not my best idea ever, but: “You get what you get and you don’t throw a fit” (quoting Tim Holtz).

That didn’t look too great of course, so I then decided to cover all skin parts in gesso, to get consistent texture at least. I then proceeded to watercolor the image and background with Distress Reinkers and added some embellishments.

So far so good, except I didn’t like the background at all, I felt it needed more interest. I used Distress Micro Glaze to seal the inked image, roughly covered the blings with some kitchen towels and sprayed the card with a Glimmer Mist by Tattered Angels (remember those? I must have had this in my stash for at least 5-6 years…)

The reason I sealed the image was of course to prevent it from being glimmermisted. I only roughly covered the blings because I expected the image to be sealed anyway so I thought it didn’t matter I wasn’t too precise.

However, as it turns out, the Glimmer Mist took hold everwhere I had used the gesso and the image was not covered! Since that was only parts of her skin, she now looked, well, bruised…😱🤭

So I decided to spray the entire image with Glimmer Mist, turning the lady completely purple – in what I’d now like to call an Artsy Way.😎 A less than perfect solution no doubt, but it was the only one I could come up with. Besides: “It’s not a bug, it’s a feature!” (quoting Steve Jobs).

To finish up, I added a die-cut in metallic purple, and I sprayed the back of the card as well – mostly as an afterthought, but I’m glad I did it.

So now we know either one of two things (I’m not sure which at the moment): a. either Micro Glaze does NOT seal Distress Ink on gesso, or b. Distress Micro Glaze only seals surfaces from other Distress products, and not other kinds (like Glimmer mist). More experimentation will be needed to find out which… 🤓

And of course I’m curious: what would have been your solution, either to deal with the spilt Archival ink, or the partly purple, quasi-bruised lady? Let me know in the comment section!

Two Tags: Inks, Oxides, Paint & Micro Glaze

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So yesterday I kicked off my new blog category, Mixed Media. Many of those will be blog exclusive, so no video. But, you will get clear pictures and descriptions of what I did and which products I used.

These two art backgrounds are Distress Tags by Tim Holtz (for Ranger), a mixed media heavy stock. For the first, I started with one of Tim Holtz’s stencils and gently dabbed some Distress Micro glaze through it in two spots, quite randomly. Micro glaze will work as a resist. So when I sprayed three colors of distress stain (the first three in the picture) over it, the stencil’s dotted pattern showed up white.

By the way, you may notice that there are hardly any actual spray bottles in the picture; that is because my main stash of Stains consists of the earlier Distress Stains, which were dabber bottles. So I removed the dabbers and poured some of the Stain in small empty spray bottles I had bought at the dollar store – turning them into Distress Spray Stains quite easily 🙂

So I went along and I placed a second stencil (the smaller one on the right) and sprayed the blue Distress Stain, some purple and the Distress Oxide spray through it. This gave a subtle floral effect. Micro Glaze will take a bit of color after you heat(-dry) it, which is why several of the dots in the end were colored after all.

For the second tag I used the same technique, but with only one stencil and with slightly different colors.

That concluded round 1, leaving me with two nice base tags. On to round 2 below!

Round 2, resist spray: To prepare for what I’m calling a ‘stencil reverse’ technique, I sprayed both tags with Distress Resist Spray entirely and let them dry.

Round 3, paints: for this ‘stencil reverse’ technique – which I learned by watching one of Tim Holtz’s demos – I covered an area of each tag with Distress Paint. I then placed a stencil over each (wet) area and removed the paint through the stencil with a damp paper towel – leaving the thin blue lines you see on both tags. With a normal stencil technique these of course would have been masked on your project, but now they are the only lines showing. A great and unexpected technique which may resemble a monoprint but isn’t one!

To add an extra color accent I added some Maya Gold metallic paint in a gorgeous dark purple called Aubergine, using a different stencil for each tag.

I was now ready to declare my two backgrounds finished, but then I noticed a small uncolored spot on the right edge of the left tag, which bugged me to no end. It seemed I had apparently touched the tag there with some Micro Glaze still on my fingers – adding a resist.

So as kind of a PS, I took a Distress Ink pad and blended a whole lot of ink over it so as to force-cover it up. It only partially succeeded of course, because of the resist, but at least the spot didn’t bug me anymore 🙂

Now my backgrounds were truly finished – and ready to be used in some creative way in a future moment!