Travelling around to various blogs and seeing what other people are making often serves as a reminder of a technique which we might have forgotten about as well as sometimes being introduced to something new. Recently I've spotted a couple of reminders of the faux bleach technique or reverse stencilling as it is sometimes known. This involves colouring card or watercolour paper using water-based inks such as Elements, Distress, Distress Oxides or similar and once it is dry a stencil is placed over the top and water sponged on (best to try not to make it too wet otherwise it can seep under the stencil and spoil the effect). The water lifts the colour leaving the design of the stencil. I used blue, purple and yellow on heavy watercolour paper and a leafy stencil.. Once I'd trimmed the piece to the size I wanted I spattered it with some mica mixed with water.
I've trimmed a snippet of my piece to make a panel for this card which I'm taking along to the challenge at the Snippets Playground for this fortnight. Had a rummage and found snippets of silvery glitzy card and some toning purple which were almost the right size for a couple of layers so very little left over from that. The dragonfly layers were die cut from snippets of the silver and faux bleached pieces, also the fun sentiment came from the piece I'd coloured..
Here is a picture of the smallest snippets and I still have some of the coloured piece left
Dragonfly and sentiment - dies from Gummiapan
Element inks in yellow, purple and blue (from Lavinia Stamps)
One of the 'reminders' of this technique came from a video by Chrissie Stokes who used 'Mr Magic' sponge (a domestic cleaning product) to apply water to the stencil and this is what I used - works well. Link to her video
https://youtu.be/MzSjRRvijWQ?si=h-nEUruH6RkqcVqu
