Creating Backgrounds - Part 4 - Brayer Fun

Have you even played with a brayer? Maybe you don't even know what one is. Maybe you have one sitting there that you haven't picked up. There are actually a number of techniques that can be done with them and I would like to cover one of my favorites today. There are also a number of different brayers, mine is a Speedball. These have been used for years in printmaking.
#1. I love to use these Kaleidocolor stamp pads with the brayer. The reason is that they are multi-colored and these particular pads have some rather clever features that make them long lasting and easy to use. This photo above is the pad as it looks when you remove the lid. The colors are stored "separate". In the past, multi-colored pads were just one pad with different colors on them and it wasn't long and the colors would just run together, making for a rather muddy look. These pads have a lever that separates the colors, you can't put the lid back on without pulling the lever to separate them.
#2. When you go to use the pad, you push the lever and the colors are pushed together to form one solid pad. In the photo above, you can see the pad with the colors pushed together and you can see how I have placed my brayer on the pad. You want to ALWAYS place the brayer back in the same direction on the pad. So, the end that started on the green end, always needs to be placed back on the green end. If you reverse the brayer or a stamp you are using, you will transfer the colors onto each other and that doesn't work well. If you do that (I am speaking from experience here) you can take a cloth and just wipe the pad and alot of that transfered color will be removed.
#3. I like to completely cover the brayer with colors by running it over the pad several times and then I use a small, misting bottle and spray the brayer. You can see by the above photo, the look that comes with the water and the inks mixed together. I am also using glossy paper here. This also works with uncoated or matte papers and I will show some of that later.
#4. Here is a piece of paper with the brayer run across the paper with two widths of the brayer, so it is run across twice. I only ran the brayer across once too but you can continue to re-ink it and run it across over and over until you have the color you want. I wanted to make sure that my inks showed well as they ran with the misting of the water.
The photo above shows a good close-up of that paper and the effect.

When you have your paper colored, there are a number of things that can be created with the finished and dry multi-colored paper.

For the card above, I just stamped a stamp over my colors using black ink. This stamp has all of these images in one piece.

I added some Glitter Fabric Dimensional paint to the flower portion only, I think you can see a little bit of the sparkle in this photo and another interesting thing is that the paint "raised" the paper in that area so it has an embossed look to just the flower.
One of my favorite things it to just stamp a background design over the colors. This leaf swirl stamp was a great choice with these fall colors.
I also used some of my colored paper to stamp my greeting and notice that I stamped the greeting with the line of colors going in the opposite direction of the colors on the background.

Thanks for visiting, Linda (lbpost)

SING TO THE LORD… card

Materials list:
Glossy cardstock
Cardstock
Creole Spice Kaleidocolor stamp pad – Tsukineko, Inc.
Leaf background stamp – Inkadinkado
Verse stamp – Printworks
Black stamp pad - Versafine

FIRST GRADE card

Materials list:
Glossy cardstock
Cardstock
Patterned paper – BoBunny Press
Bouquet Kaleidocolor stamp pad – Tsukineko, Inc.
First Grade stamp – PaperBag Studios
Black stamp pad – Versafine
Glitter Fabric Dimensional paint – Tulip
Machine sewing
Scallop scissors