Cardmaking - May - Glossy photo paper watercolour backgrounds combined with colour inkjet printed digital images

We recently acquired an inkjet printer after being without for a number of years so I wanted to see what I could do with this new tool for this month's cardmaking class.  

I chose to make some dye ink backgrounds using glossy photo paper using this common technique - apply colour to non stick mat, spritz with water and lay the photo paper glossy side down and twist a little.  It worked very well and I ended up using old dried water based markers for the blue/green and green/purple ones.  I used empty inkjet ink cartridges for the yellow and pink ones.  You can check out a tutorial at Crafting a Green World. that explains how to use dried out markers to make watercolour ink.  The sponges in the ink cartridges worked pretty much the same way.  You can check what I did with them in this blog post.  Once all the backgrounds were dry I used my new printer to print digital stamps on them (candles and cupcake - Melonheadz). I used Corel Draw to layout three different images for each 4" x 6" background and printed the images in black onto the colourful backgrounds though I could have converted my images and printed them in colour instead.  It was easy to highlight some of the details in the images with watercolour by simply applying it with a small paint brush.  I expect I could have added any colour of watercolour that I wanted to but I applied those I had used in the backgrounds. So there remains quite a few options I would like to explore with this technique.  I cut the images apart and set out to create greeting layers.   I chose light coloured coordinating cardstock and designed a layer that was 2.75" x 4.25" and added a greeting on the right hand side the colour laser printed them.  The landscape images created landscape cards with the greeting below the image.  For portrait images, it created portrait cards with a greeting running up the side.  Next, I needed card fronts!!  I chose to use rubber stamps and ink to embellish my card fronts.  That was less successful in that I had difficulty getting non muddy prints from stamps that have been used and stained with dark colours in the past when I applied light coloured inks.  So I have a pile of discards which will have to be repurposed!!  I did finally get all the card fronts ready to go.  I will consider colour inkjet printing my card fronts next time though I will have to acquire a few more vector digital background stamps that can be changed to different colours before I can do that.  It will be a process.  The card making process was fast and easy!  Glue the image to the greeting layer and then glue this large element to the card front!!  

These two cards were created while I was preparing kits for this class.  

For the yellow one, I ended up trimming the overall stamped background to allow an even margin and gluing the whole layer to a dark blue card front.  This worked very well too!!  

For the butterfly card, I used bleach for the background and then realized that it would not work well for the other cards being as they were too light for the bleaching to show up well.  I am very happy with the results of this experiment and I look forward to exploring the other options available to me in his process at a later date.  

Therese