Variations Week - Ali's View

I did something a bit different for my card for this Variations Week.

I usually work with digi stamps recently but I do still love to work with my rubber stamps and I actually already had this gorgeous Katerina Koukiotis image in my collection. Working with a rubber stamp gave me the chance to try out a technique that's much more suited to rubber stamping than digis and one that I've been wanting to have a play with for a few weeks:

The technique I wanted to use involves painting with bleach. To begin with, I used Dylusions spray inks to colour a piece of card and then I stamped my image onto the coloured card using black Versafine ink and then heat embossed it with fine black embossing powder.

I then used plain old household bleach to paint onto the image and bleach away the colour in the areas I wanted:

I bleached the colour from her face, neck and hand but left colour on her lips and fingernails and around her eyes and also on the shell. It's always an interesting effect using this technique as different inks/dyes etc react to the bleach differently so the colour you get from the bleaching process always varies.

This is such a striking image that I wanted to keep the card fairly simple and let the image take centre stage. I gave the image a border by swiping with more black ink and heat embossing with the black embossing powder and I picked a seaside-themed paper that seemed to go well with both the colours and the theme of the image. I then added lots of contrast with die-cut embellishments all in black:

To make the fleur-de-lys corner flourishes and the flowers, I cut them from white card using my Cameo and then again used black ink and black embossing powder to give them a nice, glossy, black surface.

You can buy this beautiful stamp from the Sweet Pea Stamps store, either as a single red rubber stamp or as part of a sheet of beautiful stamps (Sheet 4, Plate 171) from this talented artist.

Ali xx