A little bit of inky fun

I've still been playing around with my distress inks - they are so much fun and very addictive!  I have had mixed results while mucking around with the inks - some turned out lovely and I was thrilled, others had colours sort of 'smoosh' together and turn a kind of 'murky, browny, blah' colour!  Ah well, you live and learn!

Here are some of the results of my inking fun:

I really love how this 'Friend' card turned out.  It is my favourite so far - love the colour combo and the marbled effect.  Once the ink dried I simply stamped the bird cage image (Kaisercraft) and the 'Friend' sentiment (Amy R) and it was done.

 This next card I like too, although I wish the colours were brighter and not quite so brown.  I love the splatters of colour all over the panel, just wishing that background was lighter and brighter.

And a little close up of those lovely, inky splatters!

 

 This little birthday card has me torn.  I love the yellow and I quite like the red splatters but I wish the green was a lighter shade, it just seems too dark next to the yellow and too dark for the stamp that I placed on top.  I also wish that I'd placed the sentiment just a little further to the right of the card.

 

And this last card, well, I almost didn't post it because it is pretty awful!  And no, I'm not after sympathy comments and I'm not looking for sympathy praise...it's just one of those cards that turned out NOTHING like I had pictured in my head!  And here it is, hold your breath...if it were a plant it would be called something like 'Cardeous Horribilious' or 'Cardeous Totally Muckedupeous'...you get the picture!!

My grand vision was this:  I masked off an area for a sentiment, then I wanted to marble the lovely colours of yellow, orange, green and purple.  However, I think I smooshed the purple way too much with the other colours, causing a bit of a murky, horrible browny colour.  But the worst part of it all?  Well the worst part was that I had said to my husband, "Hey, come and watch this, this is so awesome.  I'm going to make this really cool effect on my card, it's going to look so good".  Yes, I talked it up and then I did my excellent demonstration in front of my attentive hubby, who really didn't know what to say once I lifted up the card and had these feral looking colours all over it!!  He simply said, "I think you might have mixed the colours a bit too much!" 

Anyway, I let it all dry, pulled off the mask, sat the card down (face down unfortunately) and got a few little splotches on the white masked area.  So annoyed!  So of course I tried to fix it by adding some yellow splotches to make it look deliberate...you know sometimes when you just keep trying to fix something and you just need to tell yourself to stop, there is nothing more I can do to fix this!!  Well, this was one of those times!

So, what have I learnt from all of this? 
1.  Don't brag about your work until it's finished and you actually know it looks OK!
2.  It's much easier to use the distress inks onto a panel than directly onto the card itself.  You can attach the panel if it looks good, but you can't fix the card itself if you muck it up.
3.  Use the darker colours a bit more sparingly than I have been.
4.  Practice makes perfect!

Thanks for looking!