Black Magic

Black Magic, it sounds spooky doesn't it? Well this Black Magic is not to be feared because it is a technique you can use in your paper crafting!

I decided to participate in a Technique Swap at the SU! convention this year but I wasn't sure which technique to do. I went over to www.splitcoaststampers.com and looked through their resources and found the Black Magic Technique. I watched the little video and looked through the gallery for examples and decided that I would give it a try.

My first attempt wasn't to bad but I wasn't satisfied so I ended remaking my sample. I ended up using the Just Believe stamp set. I chose to use Night of Navy, Marina Mist, and Basic Black card stock. I stamped the image in Whisper White Craft Ink and then used my heat tool to speed up the drying time, I then used my water color pencils to color the image. After I colored and stamped my background piece I assembled my card. I was pretty please with the card. So I repeated this step 10 times for the swap. Wow, that was a lot of coloring. After I colored and assembled all the cards, (the night before I left for convention at 11:00 PM) I looked at the cards and wasn't pleased with the way the coloring looked. It was too late to try something else so I grabbed a blender pen and used that on the colored image but it wasn't working to well. I realized that my blender pens are drying out. I've only had them for 4 years and have only used them for a million projects! Good thing I had a new package. After getting a new blender pen and going over my colored images, I was happy with my cards.

Note: the original instructions on SCS does not tell you to use a blender pen but I actually like the technique much better after using a blender pen on the colored image.

I finally went to bed after 1:00 AM and managed to get a few hours of sleep, but it didn't matter. I was just excited to be able to go to convention.