Two Tags and an Alcohol Ink Background

Recently I have been playing with some stamps I bought last year from Graphicus, they all have a nautical/sea theme. I have a card idea in my head for the image of the sailing ship, but it's not quite there yet. I thought I would stamp out the images last night and see where they took me. While I was playing I thought I would try out a background technique I have been wanting to have a go at since I bought some Isopropyl Alcohol a month or so ago - a much cheaper alternative to Alcohol Ink Blending Solution and it's pretty good for cleaning up that tacky gunk that cutting sticky things leaves on our scissors too! You can get it through any Pharmacy tho you may have to ask for a special customer order.

Anyhow on to my tags. First step was to chop open on 3 sides one of those tough cello bags that I get every time I buy unmounted stamps from Graphicus so as it could be opened up like opening the pages of a book. Next I dripped Alcohol Inks (the colours are Denim, Stream, Stonewashed and Lettuce and a tiny splodge of Silver Metallic Mixative) inside my "cello book" and spritzed this with some of the Isopropyl Alcohol which I had decanted into a Tim Holtz Mini Mister. Closed the cello pages and sorta smeared things around with my fingers, then opening the pages back up, I took 2 semi gloss tags I bought in Grapicus some time ago, laid them back to back and placed them between the pages of cello and once again kinda smeared things around with my fingers - I really liked the end result, the colours are lovely and soft and best of all permanent so they won't bleed when you do other stuff with them.

The stamping itself was simple enough, stamps from the Elusive Images "Undewater", "Seashore Scenes" and "Seashell Collage" themeplates stamped in Midnight Blue Stazon. The gulls in the tag with the sailing ship are from a stamp by Clarity Stamp.

On the tag with the seahorse I tried adding a little colour with Twinkling H2O paints to the shells and sea bottom to get a more sandy look - it think it looks OK even tho the paints are transparent so some of the blue/green tones of the background show through. On the tag with the sailing ship I used a white gel pen to add some foam to the waves under the ship.

With hindsight the silver mixative may have been a mistake as Stazon does not work so well with the metallic mixatives - the silver floats up to the surface of the stamping - must try this next time with Archival ink and see what happens.