SIX WHITE LEAVES

Those of you who have been following my blog for awhile are already aware of my obsession with the emboss resist technique. Anyone who is new here, well, let me introduce you to a wondrous technique with lots of wow factors.

For starters, an example of a finished card utilizing the emboss resist technique is shown below:

When using the emboss resist technique, you are sure to have eye-popping results that always please. It is a technique that is fairly difficult -- to ruin. 

To do the emboss resist technique, start out with a base of light-colored cardstock. In this case, I used a 4" x 5 1/4" piece of Whisper White cardstock. The most important thing to remember when doing this technique is to USE YOUR EMBOSSING BUDDY! It is definitely your best friend. Rub the entire surface of the cardstock with the Embossing Buddy to remove any static that could result in ugly spots of embossing exactly where you don't want them.

Carefully ink up the stamp(s) you choose to use on your background with VersaMark ink and stamp all over the prepared cardstock. You can see in the photo below that I do overlap a bit, but I try to keep the images as concise and separate as possible for maximum effect.

Once you have your images stamped with VersaMark, add White Embossing Powder to the entire surface. Tap the excess powder back into its container for future use.

With the heat tool, heat the images, moving the heat a bit so it doesn't end up scorching the paper. Once all the images are shiny and hard, they are embossed. 

Now, the real fun begins. Choose your color palette if you haven't already. Be careful when using too many secondary colors -- orange, green and violet. When these guys are combined, they quickly turn into brown. To play it safe -- at least, until you are accustomed with which colors don't play well together -- stick with the primary colors of red, blue and yellow, or hues thereof. These guys are best friends and will never lead you astray.

With a sponge for each color (I cut my stamping sponges into wedges so they go further), begin with your lightest color. Randomly sponge soft spots of this color across the embossed images. Continue in this vein with the other colors. In my card, I did use primary colors. And, here is a little color theory: You can see in my card how when yellow and blue collide, it forms a lovely green, blue and red makes purple, and combining yellow and red yields an orange.

Once the cardstock is filled with colors, you can now begin intensifying the colors in certain spots or everywhere. This is your choice completely.

After reaching the intensity of color you were striving for, take a tissue and gently rub over the embossing to remove any excess ink that remains. This makes your images pop like crazy!

You can do this technique with any color of embossing, including metallics. But the lighter the embossing is -- in this case, white -- the more the embossed images will stand out.

Since the leaves on my card had all those wonderful dots, I echoed the dot pattern by inking dots on the two edges of my sentiment piece. 

My final result:

Have you ever in your creative play tried the emboss resist technique? What do you think of it? If you are familiar with it, like me, do you go back to it time after time after time? If you've never tried it, would you do yourself a favor and give it a go? If you do, you'll never look back. I promise.

Embossed

Smiles.