First thing I tried was staining two pages with coffee. I found instructions somewhere telling us to take strong coffee grounds (fresh) and place about one to two tablespoons in the center of a paper towel. You bring the corners up wrapping the coffee and securing with a rubber band. Next you dip into a container of hot water getting the coffee good and wet and then stamping onto the paper. I let the pages sit for a few minutes until the paper soaked in the water/coffee and then took a hair dryer and finished drying.
Here I'm showing a Stillman & Birn Beta journal with two pages stained. I didn't want to go too dark as I planned to work pen and ink sketches on both pages.
(Photo taken with Ipad. Not the greatest at depicting the proper color with the lighting I had)
After I finished the staining, I decided to try using Distressed Inks and activating with water. They are suppose to bleed and blend beautifully but I had trouble with the results.
On the right side of the S&B Beta paper surface, I stamped each color directly onto the paper and then used a spray bottle to wet the paper letting colors merge and blend (holding at an angle to make the water run). For some reason in this particular journal, the stamp impressions remained and the colors didn't merge and blend as a small section did in a larger Stillman & Birn Beta journal on the back side of a page.
So I also tried the same stamping technique with sprayer bottle on the wrong side of the page in my little journal and it worked better with only a slight impression still showing on the page from the stamps. Still didn't work as well as my little experiment in the larger book.
Now what would I personally use these pages for??? I honestly don't know. For the page that didn't blend very well I decided to just write on it. For the other...........who knows. I don't have that great of an imagination or creative mindset to really know what to do with it. Maybe just do an ink sketch over it with no real planning or anything.
The page with the writing was done using a Pilot parallel calligraphy pen.
With this next page I decided to use an applicator to transfer the Distressed Ink onto the paper in circular motion. This is on the wrong side of the journal page. Then I gave it a spray with water. Color didn't really move all that well this time. Again I have no idea what I'd use this page for. Maybe I'll do some stamping or word art but I'm not too familiar with doing either at this point.
Friday our Art League is getting together to work on monoprinting using gelli plates and other printing techniques on our journal pages. Maybe from that I'll find some incentive or ideas to finish the two inked pages above.
2 comments:
I wanted to do something similar, but I was too cheap to buy distress ink, which I thought was ridiculously overpriced. I, um, used...eye shadow. I had some old boxes of shadow that I never wear and I rubbed it on the paper with the foam applicator, then "polished" the page with a paper towel. It took a couple of applications to get the antique look. As there's no water involved, the paper doesn't wrinkle.
Then I discovered that I could actually paint subtle landscapes underneath (or on top of) my text. That went so well that I sprang for a box of 120 colors of eye shadow ($9 on eBay) and those work a treat. I like to do pen and ink, and the soft shading of the eye shadow actually looks better for some effects than watercolor washes, and doesn't have an impact on the Tomoe River paper that I tend to use. And no, it doesn't come off if you polish it into the paper.
Also, it used up the eye shadow that was languishing in my closet.
What a neat idea!!! I've considered trying pan pastels but the cost has kept me from doing so because I'm not sure I'd even like them. Eye shadow would probably be a great alternative. I have old eye shadows I could try out instead. Thank you so much for sharing that!!!
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