Quick tutorial

Recently, I decorated a sheet of watercolor paper using inks and stencils and a ‘resist’ technique.

This technique means you apply something on the paper to stop the ink from being absorbed by the paper. I learned this technique from a post on Julie Fei-Fan Balzer’s blog. Here is the link to her blog : http://balzerdesigns.typepad.com

Since a few people commented on it, I thought I’d do a quick step-by-step tutorial of what I did. You’ll need watercolor paper, an ink spray, some petroleum jelly, the stencil you want to use, kleenex and some newspaper to absorb the extra ink. My stencil comes from this pack :
http://www.stencil1.com/stencils/277/nature-theme-8-pack-tiny-stencils.html

The first step is to determine where you want your image to be on the sheet of paper.

Place the stencil. Since the stencil I was using was so small, it was easy for me to hold it in place. But if you have a bigger stencil, you may want to tape it down. Take some petroleum jelly and ‘paint’ the stencil with your finger. Make sure the Vaseline fills-in the spaces of the stencil. Carefuly lift up the stencil.

You will see the raised image on the paper.

Put your watercolor paper on your newspaper and spray with your ink. Make sure to saturate so the color pops!

As you can see, the petroleum jelly stops the ink from being absorbed by the paper.

At this point, I wanted to have some ink drippings, so I tilted my paper upward so the extra ink would run down the paper. You can also blow on it, with or without a straw.

Then you have to wait until everything dries. The ink that is sitting on the petroleum jelly, doesn’t dry.

Once the rest is dry, lay a kleenex on the wet ink that is on the stencil. Then, carefully wipe off the petroleum jelly.

Make sure to get all of the Vaseline off and there you go! You can add more stencils to your page, or more ink, it’s up to you. It’s very easy to apply this technique to many projects like cards, scrapbook layouts, Project Life inserts and art journals. Have fun!

Quick tutorial

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