Make a Splash...With Powdered Pigments

Hello colorful ones!

Have you ever used powdered pigments before? I just got some of the Nuance powders this month from Lost Coast Designs, and have been having lots of fun playing with them. Just a tiny sprinkle of powder and some spritzes of water = hours of entertainment! (OK, so I am easily entertained. But you probably will be too--these powders are COOL!)

The powders are already mixed with binders that are activated by the water, so they stay on the page after you wet them instead of just dusting right off. How convenient.  ;)

So looky here at what they can do! This colorful card was made with these very pigments--I both activated them as dry powder on the paper and used them as "ink" for rubber stamping. Here's how...

This was made by sprinkling autumnal colors of the powder onto white watercolor paper, keeping the sprinkles mostly to one side of the card. I then sprayed the paper with several spritzes of water. Where you use more water, the color runs and flows together, as in the big splash of fiery red and orange on this piece; drier specks of powder can also be seen moving away from the "splash" area, which gives an interesting textured look. (You might have to enlarge the pic to get a good look at this effect.) The amount you spray is up to you! Dryish or wet, these powdered pigments look fantastic, and the colors are beautiful.

Next I took two Lost Coast Designs stamps: an abstract background from the ATC Grunge Set, and the Gothic text block from ATC Text Set 1. To ink them, I stamped into the still-wet "splash" from the Nuance powders; I wanted to carry over the colors from the splash, so I stamped the abstract grunge set stamp into the white area of the card, then stamped the Gothic text block several times to add depth and interest to the splash area. It's OK that the text is wet and messy--it's just to add texture and isn't supposed to be legible. No need to be careful with this technique!

I then gave the whole thing a spritz of heirloom gold shimmer spray...you know, because I like shiny stuff. (Actually, it's super subtle in real life, the shimmer--I didn't use much!)

After drying this background with my trusty heat tool, I then composed the word "October" using the Rustic Alphabet Set from Lost Coast Designs and embossed it with a mixture of green and copper embossing powders for a sort of verdigris patina look. Then I used a bullet-tipped embossing ink pen and wrote the word "welcome" and embossed it too.

(Here's a detail of the embossing showing the two colors of EP...maybe you can even pick up a little of the shimmer here too?)

 

I edged the card with chalk inks...mounted it on a shimmery pale gold card that I edged with heirloom gold metallic ink...then mounted the whole thing on piece of green cardstock, which I daubed with chalk ink for a soft sort of suede-y look in real life. And that was it for that project!

If you have any love to leave me, I always look forward to your comments below.  ;)

Paula <3