Techniques: Stamping and Distress Inks

Materials

6 inch Kraft Card Blank

Your choice of colouring medium

Black Ink Pad

Distress ink in at least two or three shades of yellow/light brown

Sheet A4 Card

Stamps

Paper Trimmer

Scissors

Glue

Foam Pads

Thinking of you

1. Cut the sheet of A4 card to fit the front of your card blank, leaving a small gap around all the edges.

2. Using the lightest of your choice of Distress Ink – only ink the single whole sunflower and stamp all over the white card. Do not keep re-inking, which means you will get some lighter images and some darker – this adds to the finished, faded look. Once you have several sunflowers in the lightest colour, swap for the next colour and do the same again. Finally using the darkest colour, just stamp ‘off the edge of the page’; so that you only have part sunflowers which frame your card. 

3. Using black ink, stamp the Sunflower and a sentiment onto white card. Colour the stamped image, remember to create depth and dimension by making the centre of the flowers and leaves darker. Once coloured cut out the main flower image.

4. Using black ink again, stamp the Sunflower onto the middle of your distressed background card (from step 2) Then take your coloured and cut stamp image (from step 3) and fix this on top with foam pads lining it up to the stamp image on the card.

5. Attach this square to the front of your Kraft card blank, using double sided tape or craft glue.

Experiment with different techniques to create variations of this card! Above we have used a small section from one of the stamps to create a repeat crackle effect border, then repeated steps 3 and 4 to create the dimensional flower for the main feature.