
If you love to create your own Polished Stone Paper - You are gonna love what Copic has to offer. 322 colors of Various Ink Refills (aka 322 Colors of Alcohol Ink). The ability to control where you are laying in color using the Copic Airbrush System with your Copic Sketch Markers. The availability of a colorless blending marker that can remove color from your design. A 1 liter bottle of colorless blending medium. Plus the ability to add small areas of color with your Sketch Markers. What this now gives you is more control in placing color in your designs before.
When I started this card the intent was simple to make a second sunset card using the Domino Shaped Stampbord shapes from Ampersand Art Supply . If you haven't used this product yet I suggest buying the assorted pack. It gives you a selection of several shapes and sizes of stampbord to play with. Next I placed all 3 pieces of stampbord together and stamped the image with a Versamark Watermark pad using one stamp from Stampscapes and embossed it with Ranger super fine detail black embossing powder.
On the middle Domino I added the tiny stamp of the man rowing the boat. Keeping the 3 dominoes together I then airbrushed the sky using Y17 on the top 3rd of the sky. Next I airbrushed in RV02, this color is very light for airbrushing so I had to do a couple of layers of color to get this effect. Using a C5-grey copic marker I colored in the rocks, Now I did notice that my copic sketch marker picked up some of the black dye from the embossing powder - this did add some additional grey tones to my rocks. I purposely left areas of the rock white. Then I used BV01 to lay in a pale purple in back of the tree line -again this is a very pale color so I had to do several layers to achieve this color. I colored the rocks first so that when I airbushed the purple in the sky I would get some overspray on my rocks. Since the sunset would naturally be reflected in the rocks. What I love about stampbord is that you can use your scratch tool to highlight areas of your stamped image. It also very forgiving, if you do not like the color you have applied to the stampboard simply sctch it off and add more color. For the water I used a combination of airbrushing in color, and brushing in color with the sketch end of my marker, and scratching in highlights. When I tried to use a piece of Murdock Country Creations Polished Stone Paper for my background nothing popped like I wanted it to. So I decided I needed an alcohol inked paper with a variety of colors like the sunset I had airbrushed. So I decided that this would be the perfect card to try my hand at using the Copic Various Inks to create my own Polished Stone Paper.
In case you have not tried to make your own polished stone paper yet ,here is a brief tutorial: What you will need to create your Polished Stone Paper :
- A Ranger non-stick sheet- to protect your work surface ,and as a pallette to put your Various Ink on.
- A felt applicator - I am spoiled my husband made me a larger applicator, since I always make a full 12 x 12 sheet of polished stone paper.
- Copic Various Ink 0 Colorless Blender - refill. This will make your ink flow across the page as well as allow you to remove any areas that you are not happy with.
- Glossy white paper- I prefer Kromekote as it has a very fine layer of clay.
To create this particular piece I used the following Copic Various Inks:0, Y13,V95 and the following Copic Sketch Markers 0, YR07, Y17 -currently I only have a small selection of markers and inks.What is really cool about Copic is that I could use the airbrush system to lay in additional colors of ink that I did not own in Copic Various Ink to fill in large areas of my design and I could use my markers to lay in color in smaller areas. If you have ever made paper using the Polished stone technique you know that you really don't have a lot of control over how the colors blend on your applicator- so I was more than thrilled that I could decide which colors I wanted to add where with the control of the airbrush system and the markers. Whenever I design polished stone paper I love to create a splash pattern. I do this by placing my blending solution in a spray bottle (do not use the Ranger blending solution in a spray format as it is toxic). I use denatured alcohol as it is stronger in concentration than rubbing alcohol and relatively inexpensive. I was thrilled to see how large the Copic colorless blender refill is and how affordable it is as I will end up using a ton. For this creation I decided to use strictly the copic colorless blender.
Using a new felt on my applicator, I made a puddle of Y13 on my Ranger non-stick sheet. Next I made a puddle with my colorless blender and picked it up the colorless blender ink with my applicator first, by gentle dabbing it up and down in the puddle. Next I dabbed the colorless blender ink all over the top 1/4th of my sheet of glossy white Kromekote so that the Copic various ink would move nicely. While this was still wet I put my applicator into the Y13 puddle of Various ink and starting at the top of my paper I dabbed it across the top 1/4 of my paper (I was working with a 12 x 12 Sheet.) I also made sure not to leave some of the white Kromekote showing. Next I applied with my applicator more colorless blending solution and airbrushed in YR07 over it while it was wet and then dabbed it with the applicator. Now I wanted to see what kind of effect I would get from airbrusing in with the colorless blending Sketch marker. So I airbrushed the entire image and it look like nothing had occured until I dabbed my applicator over the entire paper and Tah Dah!!! Whereever the colorless marker had sprayed I know had tiny splash patterns.
Next I tried the closest pink I had in Various Ink which was V95...it was a little on the gray side for my taste. So I applied more colorless blender with my applicator and it picked up the color and lightened my paper. I sprayed Y17 and a little more YR07 over the pink area and added more colorless blender with my applicator. I was thrilled with the end result and can't wait to make a ton more polished stone paper using the Copic Various inks.
As I placed my stamp images on the newly created Polished Stone Paper, I noticed I had a few darkers specs of copic in the yellow section of the mat, I simply picked up my Colorless Copic Sketch Marker and colored over the undesired colored areas and the colorless blender removed it!! I was more than a little excited that I could use the blending pen to remove unwanted color from my page.
I finished the card by using Balck Kromekote to mat the stampbord dominoes and the piece of Copic Polished Stone Paper I had created. I added a Rod Iron Corner Punch from EK Success and used Raspberry Twist Polished Stone Paper from Murdock Country Creations for the base of my card. I hope that this long post will be helpful to anyone who has used the polished stone technique before as well as anyone who may now be anxious to try their hand at making their own Copic Creation.