Technique Tip - Distress Ink Lifting

Hi everyone, thank you for stopping by. I hope you are all having a great day.

Today I have a technique for you all. Distress lifting. Many of us have seen the bleaching technique, where you "paint" bleach (yes, bleach. Like clorox.) onto coloured cardstock and it bleaches out the colour, either altering or lightening it.

I personally think that this creates some beautiful projects, but I have a toddlers and having containers of bleach in my crafting space -- a space she just loves -- is not something I feel comfortable with. I'm sure many of you can relate.

At some point or another, we have all used the splatter technique, where we take clean water on a brush and splatter it on the project, let it sit for a few seconds then pat it dry with a clean cloth or paper towel. You can see this in the lower right portion of this project.

The lifting technique is done much the same way, but with more control and less splatter. As you can see in the flowers.

I have found that this works best with Distress Inks by Ranger. Their reactivation properties are just one of the many reasons we love this product so much.









To begin this project, I used clear embossing powder and heat set the floral images in the top left corner of the panel.

Next select your distress colours. In the example above I used Black Soot and Hickory Smoke to create an ombre effect from top to bottom over the panel. Use a very liberal hand. I know that most of my blog talks about using a light hand and a gentle touch -- forget that. Just for this technique. It applies the rest of the time.

In the example to the right, I used Carved Pumpkin, Dried Marigold and Fossilized Amber the same way.

Using a paintbrush appropriate to the size of the area you want to lift, apply a layer of water to the area. Allow it to sit for 30-45 seconds, then pat dry with a clean paper towel or a cloth. Then move on to the next area.

Once you get the hang of it, you'll be able to do multiple areas between patting dry.

If you are doing multiple cards with different colour palettes, make sure you clean the water in between.

If I had not cleaned out my water between these two cards, the orange would have muddied and left brown spots instead of lighter orange areas.




If the area you lifted isn't the shade you want, you can always reapply the water and lift again. That is the beauty of Distress Inks. You can also reapply the ink to make it darker again if it went too light.

 I haven't tried this with other water based inks or markers, so I cannot say if it would work the same way. If anyone else has tried this with a different watercolour product, I would love to hear about your results.

In this example I used Chipped Sapphire, Blueprint Sketch, Mermaid Lagoon and just a bit of Salty Ocean at the bottom.

This ended up being my favourite out of the bunch. Because of the intensity of the darker colours, I did have to go back and reapply water a second and in some cases a third time to get the shade I wanted.

I found I got better results with darker colours than with lighter ones, likely because there was increased room to create contrast.

To finish the cards, I loosely covered the floral areas with a piece of scrap paper and used the splatter technique for the lower portion of the panel.

I then set them all aside to dry.





I used white embossing powder on vellum to create the greeting banners. To adhere them down, I used Ranger Multi Medium Matte behind the embossing to hide it, and wrapped the right side of the banner behind the panel and taped it in place.

I had mentioned in another post about gluing dots of dried glossy accents down instead of applying them directly to the piece. I do this, especially on watercolour pieces, because of the reactivation properties of the ink. If you apply glossy accents right on top of Distress ink, it may pick up the colour while drying. But if you make the dots and reapply them later they won't do that. At least in my experience.

Here is a final example for you, using Fossilized Amber, Mustard Seed and Squeezed Lemonade.

As you can see, the impact of the lifting isn't as intense as the blue or black examples above. Still pretty just not as intense.

















I hope you enjoyed today's technique and the card examples and are inspired to create something of your own.

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Hope to see you again soon.