Happy Tuesday! I hope your week has been off to a creative start… and if not, Monday’s don’t really count anyways, so it’s not too late 🙂 I brought home some new Distress Crayons recently and took a little time to do some playing… here’s what came out of my first bit of creative play with them! I’ve had butterflies in my yard already this spring and their vibrant yellow wings got me started on this project…
I started with some butterflies (mini blueprint stamp by Tim Holtz) stamped onto watercolor paper. I pretty much scribbled Distress Crayon onto them, using just 2 colors on each, and blended it out with a wet paintbrush. It was interesting to see how fluid they were and how easily they were watered down. The color spread across my image nicely, but it still retained some of that crayon like texture. I added a bit of highlights with the secondary color, layering it in some places to increase intensity. It’s a pretty quick way to color up an image!
My background was also made with Distress Crayons- I started with a kraft tag I had prepped by painting with white gesso. I like this look and I’m glad I did up several of these, they will be fun to play with! I scribbled the same three colors of Distress Crayon quite heavily across the left side of the tag, about an inch thick, moving from pink at the top to yellow on the bottom of my tag. I then spritzed with water and smeared the color with my fingers to get it moving. Distress Crayons won’t start moving on their own, so they need a little help! Once they started to mix with the water I sprayed more water and lifted the tag so colors dripped across it. While there were still puddles, I took my heat gun to it so I could keep it those drippy lines! I really like how this turned out and will be playing with other color combinations for sure! I took some skinny crinkle ribbon and used it to mop up the color that was on my craft sheet, then crinkled it up and set it aside to dry.
I used Distress paint on my sentiment/background stamp along the side of the tag, as well as on the ‘warm hello’ sentiment flag I added to the bottom of the tag. I decided to use three different glitters/beads on my butterflies as well as adding a bit of detail with a white pencil crayon and a clear glitter pen.
The butterflies were curled with my fingers before adhering to the tag- I put some foam adhesive under the wings and used Glossy Accents on the body so it would lay flat and increase the dimension of the wings. Glossy Accents was also my adhesive for the glitters!
The sentiment is an old one by Hero Arts (I still love some of their wooden sentiment sets!) and the enamel dots are also from my stash. Hope you like my tag, it was fun to experiment with Distress Crayons and create something pretty 🙂
Materials used:
Distress Crayons– vibrant set 🙂
kraft tag
white gesso
mini blueprints 2 Tim Holtz stamp set (or any butterfly stamp!)
stuff to say Tim Holtz stamp set
watercolor paper & paintbrush
Black Archival Ink
Assorted beads/glitter/bling
Distress Paint, Hickory Smoke
Thanks for stopping by! Leave me a comment and you could win a pretty butterfly stamp to inspire your creativity 🙂 Have you tried creating with Distress Crayons yet?
My background was actually done when I was making this tag with Distress Crayons, and is a similar technique, but I took a tag with gesso and dry embossed it before adding color. I like the texture you get with the color pooling in the debossed parts of the image. I used mini butterfly dies (movers & shapers) which shows off more of my grungy cardboard frame, that had multiple inks splattered and rubbed on it.
