As the final installment to this series of colormatching posts, today we will talk about Ink Pads.
An ink pad, simply put, is a block of absorbant material saturated with ink, and used to transfer ink evenly to a stamp.
Ink pads come in several varieties from dye ink to pigment ink. The type of ink that will work best depends on your project and, more often than not (at least at my house), what you have on hand. For today's post we are only concerned with color, not type of ink.
Gathering matching cardstock is pretty inexpensive - ink pads, not so much. I have a complete collection of Stampin' Up! inks which I have since discovered are pretty out dated. Alison, thankfully has a great collecion of ink pads and she is so organized that she has swatches made up from them all (I love working with her). Even with all the options we had on hand we had very few perfect "Matches" for Travel Girl.
As we our collection of inks and swatches grows, we hope to update these lists. Below we have listed both color matches (in bold) and colors we found to coordinate well with the line.
Stampin' Up!
Summer Starfruit
(Match)
Crushed Curry
Real Red (Match)
Blushing Bride
Pool Party
Gumball Green
Wild Wasabi
Ranger Distress Inks
Tattered Rose
Barn Door
Wild Honey
Weathered Wood
ColorBox - Pigment Ink
Cupid
Old Rose
Marigold
Pool
Fresh Green
Hero Arts Inks
Soft Sand Shadow (Match)
Charcoal Mid-tone Shadow (Match)
Soft Pool - Shadow
With the Maggie page I tried a few different techniques with my ink.
I started out by totally stealing Jill's idea from Tuesday's "Free Hand Title" Tutorial and giving it a try for myself. I kind of like how it turned out for a first try. I decided to use my ink pads as a watercolor ink to fill in the letters and give a color wash to the paper. Be cautious with this technique because your paper will wrinkle if you get it too wet. Mine is a little wrinkled which could be fixed with an iron but I don't have one here at work. With my Stampin' Up! inks all I had to do was squeeze the closed pads until there is ink on the inside of the cover and then you can use that as a pallet. If you are using something other than Stampin' Up! you can either find a plastic surface that you can rub your ink pads onto (a sheet of acetate or large acrylic block) or get a silicone mat that works great for this purpose. I then used the same ink pads to stamp little images on the background. The colors coordinate without being too matchy but I don't have to worry about them contrasting too much. I used the Stampin' Up! pads Real Red, More Mustard, So Saffron and Not Quite Navy.
For this page I started with a doodle in the middle of the page and then used the small stamps from Travel Girl "Traveler" clear stamp set to accentuate my doodle. The little tiny sun was actually cut out of a larger image. I then used the ink, again, as a watercolor with my water brush to do a little highlighting in the doodle. I used the SU Real Red, which is a match and More Mustard which is more of a coordinating color.
Alison created this card using the Plane Ticket cardstock and Ranger Distress Inks in Wild Honey, Tattered Rose, Festive Berries, Hero Arts Shadow inks Charcoal (mid-tone) and Soft Pool. I really love the color combination.
This is your last chance to win by sharing your favorite ink color matches. Share your Travel Girl ink color matches in the comment section below by July 26th for a chance to win the "Traveler" clear stamp set.
You can still go back and enter matches for cardstock, and markers, for a chance to win an 8x8 or the 'See the World' stamp set.
We encourage you to share your projects using Travel Girl and stamping in our flickr gallery. Tag your photo TGcolormatch and you could win a Collection Kit!
Entry for these contests will remain open until Friday, July 26.
The winners will be announced Wednesday, July 31.