Tutorial #1.....Faux Tortoise Shell.....it's my first one on Blogger, please be gentle :)

I've been promising to do this for a while now...and since my mojo's gone AWOL (may have something to do with the fact that I have this awesome idea for a card but am still awaiting the delivery of my Hougie Board and until I get the card done I think I may be in limbo tssk) so figured I'd do it straight away...have told Vickie aka Okienurse that I would, so here you go hunni, just for you!!!

Tis the simplest of techniques but soooooo very effective lol!

 

To start off with, this technique relies on ink 'bleeding a bit', so all your materials need to be water based.

Here are the ONLY things you need for this fab effect!

 

Here I have a plain white chipboard buckle slider, it has a coated paper on it. Don't panic though, you can just cover whatever piece your doing in either PVA (craft glue) or give it a quick coat of white acrylic paint! I use Whispers water based brush markers (a mid brown and a black), only because I bought the whole blooming set about a gazillion years ago (an impulse buy because I just HAD to have them all!) and am determined to get some use out of them other than water colouring my stamped images lol! A gold gel pen, mine's a Pentel one and some Ranger Sepia Accents, I use this as I think it gives a better depth of colour but you can use Glossy or Crackle accents for a different effect, or indeed ANY water based gloss medium.....

You start with the mid brown colour...

Draw 'wiggly' lines and a few blobs, leaving about a quarter of the white showing through, then get your black pen...

Drop in some odd shaped blobs of black, still leaving some white, just really randomly...then get your gold gel pen...

Fill in most of the white areas with this, slightly overlapping onto the brown and black ink...

Please excuse the fuzzy'ish picture here folks...then cover the whole thing with your Sepia Accents...it will look like a hooooge cloudy mess at this point but don't panic, this is where the magic starts.

The water in the glaze gel starts to dissolve the water based ink...this wouldn't happen with alcohol or oil based pens! BUT it doesn't mix up completely because the gel is soooooo thick, that it dries before that could happen. Leaving you with a lovely shiny piece of faux tortoise shell.

Make sure you leave it for at least 2 hours before touching it though...or you will leave finger prints or worse in the glaze! lol

Still a wee bit fuzzy but hey, it's an extreme close up, that buckle slider is less than an inch across!

The whole process of colouring and glazing takes minutes.

Hope you found this helpful, please let me know, I have lots more tips and techniques that I would be happy to share, if you're interested!

Tutorial #2 will be Old Battered Metal Effect, with embossing powders! That's if you'd like it of course!

Anyhoooo my loverlies, thanks for seeing this post through to the end :)

*hugs* Sal x

ps, if you haven't already left a comment on my candy post...what are you waiting for peeps?! lol