Creating A Watercolor Background with Distress Ink

 Hello crafters! 

It's my turn over at the Create A Smile Blog today. I'm talking about how to use your bold backgrounds. I thought maybe you would like to see how I created the background to begin with. Some of the photos are not stellar. Please forgive me, I was photographing as I went. 

I started by embossing the hammock from the Comfy set in white on water color paper. 

Until the whole thing was covered. 

Time for the distress inks! These are all the colors I used. Yes, they are rainbow.  Can you at least feign surprise for me?  

I smoosh (It's a very technical term. Has anyone seen Stepmom because it's in there ;) the distress ink onto my craft mat. 

Add a water to your distress inks and to your paper. I loaded mine down. They blend so much better when they are really wet. 

Next I used a paint brush to pick up some ink. I colored three rows with each color so that I had a really nice ray of colors. . For example red with pink, red alone, and red with orange. Also I didn't clean my brush except between the orange and yellow. I was worried if I had orange on my brush when I went to do the yellow/green row I'd get brown. Yick. 

Keep going until it's all covered. If parts start to dry out on you just spritz on some more water. 

You can see it's still really wet. 

But it dries so pretty :) 

Then you can use it to make pretty cards!! Here is one of my cards. Head over to the Create A Smile Blog to see all three :) 

Thanks for dropping in!

XoXo