A Green Cat ? (really?)

I've decided to try my hand at painting using distress inks, so I've bought a few basic colours and had a play.

Although I've been using copics for the last couple of years, way back when I started card making several years ago, I used twinkling H2O paints which are water based.  So I approached this new distress ink painting technique thinking 'how hard can this be?'  

Pah !!

It's flippin' hard when you're not familiar with water colour painting!!!

Despite my lack of talent, I'm willing to share a few of my first attempts, and you can easily see how bad it is.  But hopefully you might also see some slight improvement even in these limited trials.

Here's my first effort, so bad I didn't even finish it ...

And no, your eyes are not deceiving you, the cat is dark green with a lime green tail.  This is because, in order to see if I could get along with the inkers, I only purchased 5 colours; brown (for bears and hair - necessities in my mind!) blue and purple (cos I love them and the shop didn't have pink which would have been my first choice) and 2 shades of green (even though I don't like green, I thought it was useful for grass and backgrounds).  So yes, I tested all my new colours on this sampler, and the cat got the short straw with the green !! LOL

The purple and blue turned out ok(ish), and I managed to get a bit of shading on them, but the brown was just awful.  I just could not blend it on the face, and there were hard lines where I'd added the paint.

For the rest of the image, I painted a light layer of clean water on the image before I put any colour on and that seemed to work better, so the feet were marginally better than the face.

I decided to ink up something else and try again.

Here is my second attempt, where I'd painted a few drops of clean water over the image to dampen the area before I put any colour onto it.  Again the brown was not as good as the rest of the image.

The addition of a bit of water seemed to be producing more 'reasonable' results.  Still not great but definitely starting to see some shading.

To congratulate myself on an improvement, I decided this image was worthy of making into a card.

After giving my bear a bit of bling and embellies, he doesn't scrub up too bad.

Attempt number 3.  I tried another image, still fairly restricted by my available colours, I stuck to animals that could be brown (no more green cats this time)!

I have managed to get a bit more control over the brown, but still learning.  I used some offcuts of Christmas papers to make this one into a card too.  Here's the finished card using this image and my scraps :

And finally, another trial, managing to use all my available colours again !!!  (yes a purple moon - well it could happen on a hazy night! LOL)

Not too bad, for my first attempts?  What do you think?

I concluded that I'd like to try again, but need some more colours, pink being top of my list.

If anyone has any tips on this subject, please leave me a comment.



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Card Recipes:

• Images - various from Lili of the Valley
• Sentiment - Typed / One of my own Freebies
• Colouring - Distress ink reinkers, Copics (pink cheeks only), Sakura Stardust Gel pens (sea)
• Card base - Elegant Edge from The Stamp Basket
• Papers - Summertime Designs / /My Minds Eye / Papermania
• All flowers - Wild Orchid Crafts
• Nesties - Lacey circles, Labels 18
• Snowflake Dies - My Favourite Things
• Memory Box Madera Corner die - The Stamp Basket
• Memory Box dies - Snowflake Corner
• Swirl - Magnolia Leaf & Swirl die set
• Ribbons - Fantastic Ribbons
• Crystal Glamour Dust - The Stamp Basket
• Liquid Pearls - The Stamp Basket
• From my stash -  Pearls, glossy accents, Fluffy stuff (snow)

I've been inspired by:

• My Mum's Craft Shop Challenge - Anything Goes
• Simon Says Stamp - Anything Goes
• The Ribbon Girl - Pearls (either of the 2 bear cards)
• Papertake - Anything Goes & not a square (Wedding day bears in boat)
• The Crafty Pad - Scraptastic (kittens in tree)

Happy crafting.