Getting Inky & Messy with Tags

Hello Peeps,

I had a little play the other evening with some Adirondack inkpads, water and some tags.

I felt like getting me hands a bit mucky as I have been neglecting my inks for a while :O) and I seem to get into a rut of only using one type of ink - like my previous love affair with Chalk Inks, I seem to be getting over that now....am I the only one who seems to stick on one thing for what seems like ages and the other poor old members of the stash are left neglected and lonely???? :O))




I started off by rubbing the inkpad directly onto the craft sheet, spritzing with water and then swooshing the tag thru the mix....this was toooooo much! It just ran off the tag and didn't really colour it with any depth. Even when I used my heatgun to dry it, I was left with a pale splodge - not nice! So, I switched to Cut & Dry foam - picking up ink from the pad and then smudging onto my craft sheet. I spritzed over the smudges with water to dilute the inks and again, swooshed a tag thru the inkyness.




Mmmm, it just went all blotchy and there weren't really any outstanding points.....but, what was left behind looked rather interesting...lots of little droplets of inky water in all different patterns and colour depths.....so, I thought to myself, if I use a scrap of paper to do the first swooshing, this will leave more droplets on the mat, then I can use the tag to pick the droplets up and get a better look! To get the finished look on the tags, what I did was....*gosh, I sound like a right old mad one here* ...what I did was, swoosh the scrap paper, then swoosh the tag, dry the tag with a heatgun, then pat the tag onto what was left of the inkyness, repeating until I had used it all up! Et voila!




Ohhh, I loved this, so in order to add a little more interest to the background, I did the same method again but with a different but co-ordinating colour....and guess what? It really worked! I am probably showing my Granny how to suck eggs here and you will have all done this hundreds of times before but I am loving this look and it really goes well with the style of stamping I am using!





Here are the pieces of paper that I used....just ordinary white paper squares from one of those holder jobbies that you sit next to your phone, you know the type I mean LOL I am saving these cos I reckon I can make use of them...they look really nice now they are all dried and not so crinkly!!




I went on to use several different colours of the Adirondack inks - including; Wild Plum, Rust, Lettuce, Pitch Black, Denim, Butterscotch, Stonewashed and Cranberry. To add a little bit of finish to the tags, I edged each of them with one of the colours I had used on each one, using good old Cut & Dry to do this....I like the look!




I coloured ten tags in total and I am now in the process of altering them using only Tim Holtz stamps, Idea-ology bits and Grungeboard, oh and a few Distress Stickles and Ranger paints too....I will blog the finished tags thru the week as there are a few already done which I am rather chuffed with ... and it was nice to be really strict and only have the Tim range to play with....like that is so limiting....not!!! LOL

Thanks for looking and I would appreciate comments about this lot as I haven't really done an inky post like this before! And, have I just waffled on for hours about something that everyone knows about??? LOL

Cheers

Hels x