A busy week of work called for some serious down time tonight, which in turn called for glitter! I revisited a technique I have done before, only this time I used my new Stampin’ Blends alcohol markers.

The technique is using alcohol markers on micro-fine glitter. You can check out previous times I have done this using my Nuvo Alcohol markers. This time I wanted to use the Stampin’ Blends to see if there was much difference, and to me there was. The Stampin’ Blends are a very juicy marker and the colour just flowed through the glitter at the lightest of touch.

You do need a few different things to do this, or at least to do it the way I do it. You will need sheets of double sided adhesive paper, some black outline stickers (the ones I used were from Elizabeth Craft Designs), some microfine glitter and of course the alcohol markers. I have done this technique a few times now and I find following the following steps the easiest way:

1. Cut a piece of the double side adhesive to fit your sticker. You want it slightly bigger so that you that you have a bit of leeway when sticking on your sticker, but not so big that you end up wasting a heap of adhesive paper.
2. Peel off one side of your adhesive paper backing and stick the adhesive paper to a piece of whisper white.
3. If you need to, cut down your piece of whisper white to match the size of your adhesive paper
4. Remove the other side of the adhesive paper backing and place it down on your desk
5. Remove the black outline sticker from it’s backing and place it on the piece of backing paper (from step 4), sticky side of the sticker facing up
6. Pick up your piece of whisper white with the adhesive backing, and press it the sticky side down onto the black sticker – so the sticky sides of both are together.
7. Press down firmly and burnish a bit with a bone folder, then remove the backing sheet.
8. Be careful not to put your fingers all over the sticky part of the paper. At slight border becomes useful at this stage as you have something to hold onto.
9. Sprinkle microfine glitter onto the sticky paper and make sure it’s well covered.
10. Tap of excess and then ‘polish’ the glitter. Polishing is where you rub your fingers hard all over the glitter in a polishing motion. It smooths out the glittery surface. If you are using a coloured microfine glitter this step also brings out the colour.

These steps might sound confusing but they are actually quite straightforward when you sit down to do it. If you are a visual person, check out this video – it’s something I found useful when I did it the first time.

With the above done, all that is left is to colour your image. With alcohol markers, particularly the juicy Stampin’ Blends, you really only have to touch it to the paper to spread colour. In fact you don’t want to use a normal colouring motion else you will damage your nib. You want to use a very light dabbing motion (on the side of the nib not the tip). I used the brush end for both of the pieces I did.  I used light and dark Bermuda Bay, Light and Dark Pool Party, Light and Dark Old Olive and Bronze.

You will find that you can’t really go over the same area twice with this medium as it tends to just remove colour rather than blending it. To get the blended colour look I work fast in multiple shades, swapping out the pens constantly.

Once I had coloured I then trimmed down the panels. I couldn’t really work out a nice layout that suited the flowers, so in the end I only use the owl. I will save the flowers for something else.

I picked colours based on this weeks Addicted to CAS design challenge which was using the code word ‘TEAL’. For the layout I again used the sketch for the current Inspire.Create Challenge, I really liked this layout and although I had already entered one card (see here) I thought why not do another!

I hope you give this technique a try, let me know how you go.