I Ink, therefore I am...

Hello folks,
Just gone midnight...tip-toeing it into Friday! Just spent the evening getting all inked up which thankfully wears off during my morning swim. Signing in to post my Grungy Monday gossip which is an ode to the joy of Mr. Holtz's Distress Inks. At home with names such as Hoover and Omo, Distress Inks have almost become a national institute found on the desk of many. Grunge Guru or Cutey Tooty type, everyone has a little black box somewhere.
As it is all about the ink I decided I wanted to work with just that, paper and minimal embellishments. letting the colours and great tones have the spotlight.

I have made a flora themed triptych of tags, using mainly stamps by Paper Artsy. The tags are coloured with Barn Door/Fired Brick, Stormy Sky/Chipped Sapphire, Scattered Straw and edged with Black Soot. It spent some time building up the layers of colour and as any beautician will tell you blend, blend, blend...! It's not my usual colour choice which is a tad scary at first but now I am glad I took the plunge. I have added water splashes, water-mark stamping and some background detail in Sepia Archival ink before moving onto the main images. I tried some designs out first by roughly stamping on some scrap paper to give me some direction.

I have stamped a fair bit in Plum Archival ink as I didn't want the images to be too harsh. I tried to position the images to make the best of the light and dark tones. My first centre tag looked fine to begin with but soon ended up in the bin as it was just too dark in ALL the wrong places. No fixing that - even with a serious overdose of Mustard Seed.

I used a mixture of Ranger Plum, Olive Green and Sepia Archival inks to layer up the details on this tag. You can't beat a good Archival ink when you stamping onto a strongly coloured background. The flower was stamped in Blue Lagoon for a bit of contrast but still not too overpowering. I've distressed and bent it a little but otherwise still sticking to the pure paper and ink idea and backing away from my embellie Deli.

Just love this flower, it's always willing to adapt to your mood and seems to work in any colour combo. The sentiment is stamped black this time to give it a bit of definition. The butterfly is stamped and cut from a bigger collage stamp. I have shaped the wings a little but I haven't gone for lots of dimension as I didn't want to distract the eye too much from the tag. I given them all a good distressing on the edges to maintain a raw feel, joining them together with wire scraps. I just added some of my favourite gold thread and one simple blue ribbon to the each top.

I had an intense evening of ink and colour and hope I've done justice to Distress Ink-o-rama. Fancy joining in or want to see more great odes to Mr. H's inky clan? Head over to Linda at L3 and take a look. I'm signing off for tonight, thanks for calling by - visits and responses both welcome and appreciated!

Sarah.