Mixing It Up - Painting With Bleach!

Hello and welcome!  If you follow me you know this month I've been playing with a bleach painting technique that a friend introduced me to... apparently an old technique that is totally new to me and maybe to you too!  Or maybe you haven't done it in a while and will happy for the reminder.

For this one, I started with a panel cut from some red cardstock.  When you decide to play with this technique, the paper you start with is important.  I found that some of my cardstock had a surface that the bleach didn't even begin to discolor!  You'll want to test your paper before you get your heart set on using it.  This paper I've been using the last couple weeks is Coredinations Color Core Cardstock and it worked great!  I'm sure there are lots of others, but this is one I had in my stash that worked.  I used the Diamond Fade stencil and applied some Barn Door Distress Ink to the entire panel through it.

After the ink was dry, I placed the panel into my Misti and started stamping the floral onto it, first in Black Tuxedo Memento Ink and then with Versamark over the top and heat embossed it with clear embossing powder.  I started with this flower from the Gardenia stamp set and embossed it....

And then I masked off that flower and stamped and embossed the next.  Yes...I did some masking.  If you know me, you know I hate it and rarely do it, but I've been kind of digging using it with this technique!

Once I had all of my images stamped and embossed, I put a little bit of bleach into a bowl (you really just need a very small amount... a cap would probably do...lol!) I used one of my fillable brushes because that's what I grabbed and it worked well.  I didn't fill it with anything, but I thought the bristles would hold up well to the bleach... so far so good!   I wrote on it the word "bleach" and that has become my bleach paintbrush.  Then you can just paint your image.  The hardest part for me was making sure I only "painted" the image and didn't accidentally paint the background.  And  you can go right over the embossed lines... since the embossing is clear, it doesn't bleach out the lines at all.  I have used this technique when my line wasn't totally embossed and the line became bleached.  I just wash my brush with water when I'm done.

And there you have it!  You can just leave it as it is... cool looking, right!?  But I can't just leave well enough alone, and I love to use my Prismacolor pencils and color in a little bit of the image to add some dimension...

I choose two colors for each of my areas... a dark version of the color I want... in this case a reddish brown.. and then something very light and neutral to blend the edges with... I chose a nice putty color for all of my areas.  I love the vintage look this gives to my images!  As you can see I just color a very small amount of the image because I like to highlight the images in all of their beautiful bleachiness!

When I tried to decide on a sentiment, I decided I wanted to use a banner from Springtime Banners, but I didn't want it to be bright white when I had all of this vintage feel going on so I stamped and embossed one of the banners onto the red cardstock as I had for the florals and bleached it, colored, stamped the sentiment from the Decaf Background stamp set, cut it out and popped it up and I LOVE it!

And there you have it!  I hope you give this technique a try because it is a lot of fun.  I'm not done playing!  I'll have another similar but different coordinating card up on my blog tomorrow and next Friday I will wrap up my month of bleach!

Hope you enjoyed your stop here today and be sure to come back real soon for some more Miss Ink inspiration!