Mixed Ranger Media Background Tutorial

Hello!

I hope you all had a great week - I'm so glad the weekend is here!  I was playing around in my studio this week and wanted to do some cool backgrounds.  I love the color palette of the Ranger Color Wash sprays, but I wanted lighter tones, and an idea was born.  I've always been a fan of combining different colors of the same product, but started wondering how I could combine different products as well.  All products are available (or will be very soon!) at Simon Says Stamp.  Here's what I came up with...

I started with the darkest of the color wash sprays, espresso, and combined it with the picket fence distress stain.

I started by applying a generous amount of the picket fence stain to my craft sheet.

Then sprayed the espresso color wash over top of the stain.

Pressed a manila tag into the mixture and "scooched" it around a little bit.

Here's the result after one pressing.  Cool, right?

Then I lightly pressed random areas of the tag into the leftover inks/sprays to get some random spotting.

Did the same thing using cranberry color wash spray and picket fence distress stain.

 I got two tags out of the pressings of inks.

Then I thought... color wash sprays are reactive with water, just like distress inks, so I spritzed some water over the whole tag hoping to get some watermarks.

It worked!

Here's another combination - sailboat blue color wash and picket fence distress stain.  This is just from ONE pressing.

Then I combined dusty concord distress stain with bubblegum pink dylusions ink spray.

Here's the result after one pressing.  Nice, but a little boring, right?  Keep dipping and dripping...

And you get this...

Then, instead of adding random splatters of water, I added splatters of perfect pearl mists.  I misted several squirts of perfect pearls (one color at a time) into the palm of my hand and then splattered it onto the tag, heat drying in between colors) so I got nice big splotches.  I used pink gumball and forever violet.

And, finally, I combined mustard seed distress stain with postbox red dylusions spray inks.

I think this is my *favorite* !!! I used the back of a previous experiment tag that had lots of blue, and the edges still show, and I *love* that!  Did some water splatters on this as well. 

So... if you're stuck for a new color combo, don't limit yourself to one product line - mix it up!  These tag backgrounds are now ready for stenciling, stamping, doodling, etc.  Hope you have a chance to play this weekend!  Let me know what you think!

~ ellen.