Technique Time with Gail - June 2021 Colouring Techniques

  Hello Squashettes!

Gail here today, a little later than planned, but hopefully it's worth the wait...........

Today I want to talk about colouring techniques, in particular using watercolours with your embossing folders.  I'm gonna call this my squashy sploshy period....

The easiest thing to do is probably to smear your folder with a water reactive ink, such as distress, spritz and send that baby through the machine.   This gives you a nice background colour and leaves your embossed image white, or whichever colour your card was to start with.  In my case I started with a grey woodgrain card and went a bit crazy with the water, so it's not as clean and well defined as I am sure it could be, but for my 'Thinking of You' card it works for me.  I used Sizzix Bird embossing folder for this card.

You can also use watercolour paints and a brush, or water reactive pens/pencils to colour parts of the folder design.  Here I embossed Sizzix Cockerel Frame and used some tri-paint colour sticks I have.   I used a waterbrush to pick up colour from the light green colour stick and painted the embossed area of the frame.  Then I wet the colour sticks and applied colour to the embossed outline of the bird and then to the debossed areas inside the bird, spreading the colour with my water brush.  

 

You can also try some resists to keep your embossing pristine and give interesting effects.  Embossing powders and wax are good to use with water based colours.   I used Brusho wax sticks here and Brusho powders for a blast of colour.  These wax sticks are like colourless crayons. 

I embossed Nellie Snellen Ball Flowers on white card, used the wax sticks on the embossed texture, sprinkled the Brusho powders where I wanted my colour and spritzed with water.  This gives a much more random effect to the colours, but love that wax resist.

Here I've used the same wax resist with Sizzix Groovy Flower folder but I mixed my Brusho's with water first and used them as watercolours to fill in the embossed design.  This gives more control on where the colours end up.

I hope I have given you a few ideas for using watercolours with your embossing folders.  Drop back on the 10th for a fun new challenge with Jo and I and our awesome guest.   See you then.  Hugz