Darkly Lit Technique by Heather Taylor

I first learned a variation of this technique from Lori Roberts on Oriental Stamp Art, but I decided to play with it a bit further and experiment. The basic idea is to cover a portion of your dark cardstock with white, then paint over that in color, allowing you the opportunity to make your colors POP!

First, choose a nice, basic, dark cardstock. It shouldn't be too textured, nor plasticized--you need some soaking in to occur.

Choose your stamp (mine is a pear by QwikArt Art Stamps) and stamp and emboss it in clear ink on the dark cardstock. Next, take any opaque white acrylic or pigment paint. Place a splootch of it in a small dish, and dab a cotton ball in it several times so the paint is well dispersed, then dab all over your stamped image [see picture 1.2] Once the image is entirely covered in white, take a cotton ball spritzed with plain water and clean up the lines [see picture 1.3]

Picture 1.2	Picture 1.3

Now add your color. Here I used Tombow watercolor markers, first making a line following the inside of the shape [see picture 2], then using a paintbrush dipped in a bit of water to draw the color in to the middle [see picture 3.] Notice how the white underwash really gives luminosity to the color! Continue filling in your image, adding shading where necessary  [see picture 4.]

Picture 2	Picture 3	Picture 4

I decided to add a real zing with some Twinkling H2O's [see picture 5]. The shiny bits never show up properly in a scan, but it's a really fun touch in real life. The white that remained around the image seemed a bit too contrast-y to me, so I darkened it a touch by sponging Coal Black Ancient Page dye inks around the image [see picture 6], then tore around it, layered it on green fiber paper, then back onto the same color of the original cardstock, and finally glued a small dragonfly charm to bring the eye back around.

Picture 5	Picture 6

If you don't like the "halo" from applying the white with a cotton ball, here are a couple of variations:

	1. Use the same acrylic white (could also be white pigment reinker), diluted a little so the background shows through when it dries, and paint it on with a paintbrush. Once it's dry, use a moist paintbrush (just water) to remove the paint from the embossing lines. On this sample I colored the image (Stamp Francisco) back in with water and chalks.
	2. Use opaque white StazOn, blended with StazOn remover to dilute it, to paint in the image (Stamp Francisco). This one is then further painted with dye reinkers (mostly Ancient Page, but also one Marvy and one Ranger Adirondack.)

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