This wood-mounted Hero Arts stamp may leave you wondering when you see it, but when you take a couple distress ink pads and drag them across the image, you will see some remarkable results. It is a perfect image for a background of your favourite art-card, or a nice background to start an art-journal page.

Along the lines of an art-journal, the kits below from BoBunny and KaiserCraft create some very interesting backgrounds. The BoBunny kits have a number of pieces in them. If you are looking to add a number of images to one page you might want to consider varying your inks from pale to medium to dark.

Now that spring is here, you might be looking to add a little more brightness to your cards. Most people consider the distress inks to all have a grey/taupe hue to them, but there are some newer colours which are much brighter without those undertones. The three we used below would be a perfect example. We have used a 10-point high-gloss card as the base and coloured with the distress inks. In order to achieve this watercolour effect, we swiped each of the colours onto the clear block, and misted heavily with water until droplets form. As you press the clear block against the clear-gloss cardstock, the colours will blend and bleed. If you have not used too much water, your background will dry quite quickly. We then stamped the Magenta floral silhouette with black archival ink. The tiny butterflies stickers have been attached to pink cardstock and then glittered with a glue pen and glitter. This background technique will provide you with as many options as you have dye-based ink pads. She who dies with the most dyes wins! ;) 

 



The modeling cream shown below is great for lots of different textures. In the card sample shown, we have spread a thin coat of modeling paste onto cardstock, and while the paste was still wet, the Penny Black stamps were stamped into the paste. After the paste dries, (10-15min.) you can cut out your flowers and leaves, and arrange the beautiful pearled images as you like on your card. The winter berries stamp was used with silver-pearl embossing powder on an off-white shimmer texture card in the top left and bottom right corners. The sentiment is embossed with a platinum embossing powder so it would stand out better. If you're looking to design an elegant card, don't forget the impact that all white or off-white can have.