5 Ways to Play with Color Blends!

Hello Blogland, I am so excited to play with Eileen Hull's Color Blends today. I am also very thrilled to announce I am on the Eileen Hull Design Team! You may have seen me at the last 3 CHA (now AFCI) shows as a crew/roadie/Minion with Eileen and her trailer Scotty. I have been a big fan of Eileens products for years & regularly teach & demo using her Scoreboards Sizzix dies. It certainly makes sense for me to be blogging more about her products cause I LOVE EM!  

On to my first post! This month the design team are playing with Eileens Color Blends from ColorBox. This is rather appropriate as I met Eileen for the first time while demoing this product at a local scrapbook store years ago. We hit it off immediately as we have similar backgrounds being military spouses, love to chat and her granddaughter and my daughter even share the same name!

On to the fun! I love making art journal pages. It is a great way to play with product, figure out how it works, experiment & just play. I started with the backside of an art journal page, made with a piece of patterned card stock, great way to use up your stash. The paper was very busy so I knocked it back a little using gesso, and created a bit of texture as I put it down with a spatula. 

I decided to use the Hummingbirds stamp set from Darkroom Door as my theme. I love, love these little flitty birds & have a feeder right outside my studio window so I get to see them in the summer months. Putting photos on art journal pages in a great way to include your personal life to your art and it helped me choose my color palette.

If you are not familiar with how to use these unique inks there is a video tutorial by Eileen here. The highlights are:

• permanent when heat set
• 10x the amount of ink than a regular stamp pad
• hands stay clean
• extremely versatile
•  comes in 16 colors

 Technique 1- watercolor background- I started by putting some color directly on my page & blending it using water and a paint brush. They blend really well using this technique and I was able to get some nice vibrancy.

Technique 2- make some pools of color on your craft sheet or palette paper and use as a paint to watercolor in a stamped image. Stamp with an archival waterproof ink. Here I liked how controlling the color is easy, more water = translucent, less water = darker but still translucent.

Technique 3-ink with a background stamp. OK this is cool. I used the Color Blends by swiping the color Ebony on my script stamp. The images are crisp and permanent when heat set!

Further example with this technique. I added gesso to a book page to push the type to the background. Using the same technique add Color Blends to the script stamp. If I add a spritz of water the image is looser and has a watercolor feel to it. You can see by my book paper that in spots where no water was used the image is crisp, in others a spritz of water changes the look of my stamp. Yet after drying with a heat gun the ink did set permanent. I was able to add a wash of water color to the top and the script stayed put! Very cool. 

Technique 4- use multiple colors on a stamp. This was my favorite, super quick and simple to do as you have really good control of where your color goes unlike using an ink pad. The built in foam allows for easy application. More ink gives a darker image, give a light spritz of water and total watercolor look. Above you can see I got 4 stamped images without re-inking. 

Technique 5- Embossing. This ink has a slower dry time when used at full strength so I was easily able to use it with a stamp and heat emboss "Fly High". I have not had good results using ink pads to heat emboss so this was a bonus. That way if a spot of your image is missing the emboss powder the image is still visible. YAY! 

For the flowers the above book paper technique was used and die cut with Eileen's Flower Layer's with Heart Petals. I doodled a bit and layered the flowers alternating the colors and adhering with a brad. Tip: put a spot of glue on each piece as you layer to keep them in place. I added some thread underneath for a bit of flair.

To give the page a bit of that grungy look & to help the pieces pop, simply hit the high points with heavy body copper paint. I also used the Ebony Color Blend to distress the edges of my scrap of paper and art journal page. So easy to just swipe away. 

All that was left was assembly. Pulling stuff like the red net from my junk stash (clementine fruit bag) and journaling on a tag. The page is done! Thanks so much for joining me, leave me any questions or comments & have a wonderful inky day.

Supplies:
Eileen Hull Color Blends by ColorBox
Eileen Hull Flower Layers with Heart Petals by Sizzix
Stamps by Darkroom Door
Emboss Powder & charm by Emerald Creeks
Photos by me!
Copper paint by Golden