Sunday 19 May 2019

Inking and Floral Gifting

We've had lots of questions about our new pigment inks this week - Versafine Clair from Tsukineko - and what to use them for.  If you've not used a versafine pigment ink pad before, then let me introduce you to fine detail perfection!  I've used Versafine Onxy Black for my sentiment stamping for years - I really don't think you can beat it for solid colour and detail, so when they brought out this new range of "Clair" pads in 24 gorgeous colours, I knew they were coming to store as I wanted ALL the colours!


So today I've picked 6 colours in a rough rainbow so play with to make a set of floral cards to make a little gift set.  I think it can be fun to theme a set of cards if you're making them as sets - here the one floral stamp - Vintage Flowers from Concord and 9th has been used in a variety of ways and just paired with different sentiments to bring the set together.   I picked this floral because well, its beautiful, but also because it has lots of fine line detail and I wanted to show how Clair picks that out with one single impression.

I used the Hero Arts side fold A2 cards and matching envelopes so I could easily make a set of 6 cards to tie in a nice bow to make a good little gift pack for a friend - packs like this with mixed sentiments are great gifts as then non-card makers have cards on hand when they need them.


For my rainbow I selected Versafine Clair in Glamorous, Summertime, Golden Meadown, Verdant, Shady Lane and Warm Breeze.

For my first card I went with Glamorous, a dark pink, and simply stamped the flower in the top corner and stamped a sentiment in the same colour at the bottom.   The second card I used Summertime which is a peachy-orange and this time I just repeat stamped the flower in all four corners leaving a deliberate white space in the middle for the sentiment which was stamped in onyx black.

The sentiment  for both cards comes from MFT's Anything But Basic Encouragement stamp set.


Next came Golden Meadow and I went with a single bloom again but paired with some stitched detail using the Just Stitching Double Rectangles from the new Lawn Fawn Release.   I wanted a get well card in the set, but didn't want anything too mushy so paired the floral image with a snarky sentiment from Lil' Inker Designs Sassy Pants stamp set.

For the birthday card I stamped the flower twice in opposite corners using Verdant ink.   One of my favourite things to do with pigment inks is to use the straight to paper technique to get exact match card stock strips for adding sentiments to.  I just cut a strip of white to the width I wanted but longer than I needed so I could hold a clean bit and then just stroked the ink pad across til I got a wide enough length to fit across the card.  I stamped the sentiment from Anything But Basic Birthday Wishes on top using another Clair Ink in Shady Lanes.



I wanted to include more birthday cards in my set as they are the ones we send the most.  As much as I love floral images though, floral cards aren't for everyone, so I wanted to go sassy again and make a bold statement.  I used Hero Arts wooden stamp - Snarky Birthday stamped onto some Hero Arts card stock this time and once I had that I marked off where it would sit in the middle of the card and masked off the area so I could stamp the floral image at top and bottom and not have the leaves crossing over each other.   I used Shady Lane ink on this one (the bottom image has a spot in the middle that's not crisp - that was because my mask creased so I didn't get a good impression and I didn't want to risk lining it up again so left it slightly imperfect!)

Finally I went with the gorgeous teal (who me lol!) that is Warm Breeze and similar to the orange filled the whole card but this time without any gaps.  I used the leaves and buds to fill in the edges.   The sentiment is another from Anything But Basic Birthday Wishes stamped onto more Hero Arts card stock which does co-ordinate well with the tones of the inks.







The details on the inks say they are perfect for using with pencils and watercolour but do not mention copics so lots of you asked if they could be used with copics.   Normally the answer is a resounding no, but ever the maverick, I wanted to give it a try (let me ruin my stuff so you don't have to!)


Here I used Golden Meadow Versafine Clair and LEFT IT TO DRY OVERNIGHT.  I do not know what the drying time is for the inks.  If you want to try this I would leave them for a least 3-4 hours or heat set them and test before doing a full on colour.   However after 24 hours I found NO ISSUES at all using my copics - I deliberately used some 00 colours to see if the inks damaged the tips but there was no bleeding of the ink and no colour transfer.   PLEASE CHECK YOUR MATERIALS FIRST though - I used a papermania ready made 300gsm card to stamp on.  Other papers may affect the ink.   TEST, TEST, TEST - but I think as long as it is FULLY DRY, there shouldn't be an issue.

Versafine inks would be good for solid stamps too - they would be great on Turnabouts - crisp detail, solid pattern stamps, as colour under clear embossing.  Anything where you want a really bold strong colour - they're your ink!

Hope that answered all of your questions but leave me a comment below if you want me to try out something else for you with them.







NEWS FROM THE STORE

This week we will have the May stamp and die release from Altenew in store

The big summer release from Avery Elle is on Thursday and we hope to have it in store for release day customs willing.

We will be ordering the latest release from Lil' Inker Designs too so should have that this week or next.

Catch you later

Tara



1 comment:

  1. Great post. Thank you testing out the inks, I love the colours you've used. Super cards too.

    ReplyDelete

Thanks for taking the time to leave a comment - we hope the blog inspires your creativity.
The Seven Hills Crafts Design Team