Tutorials by Sweet Shoppe Designs

Hello, Heather here, with a fun little technique you can do to your background paper to give it a little character. I’ve recently become really drawn to art journaling which uses a lot of paint and other mixed media. I’ve found that with paint stamps or brushes you can easily do this fun technique to give your pages that extra little something. Here’s an example of what I’m going to show you. Here is a layout I’ve done. I just really thought it could use a little bit more…

so I started playing with some digital paint and a second paper in the kit that had similar colors but had gorgeous flowers on it. So using Krystal Hartley’s My Stamp Stash No. 3, I placed some paint in the bottom corner just to see how this technique would turn out…

added the complimentary paper on top

and clipped it to the paint using “ctrl-alt-G” (PSE = ctrl-G, Command-G for Mac users)

Oh… I like that… let’s add some more and see what happens using a different stamp and layering a little bit over the other stamp, this is what it looks like now…

NOTE: I did not actually merge the paper and paint swatches together… the reason for leaving the paper just grouped with the paint and not merged is so that I can move the paint swatches w/o moving the paper swatches and keep the flowers from breaking up in case I change my mind on how I want to “paint” my background paper…

OK… I’m really liking how this is going… as I progress I’m finding that this technique looks good along the edges of the paper and then behind any clusters… take a look as I progress through doing the same thing and using an assortment of the stamps…

and this would be my final layout with the addition of the one last paint swatch to the top edge (click image for full credits)…

Here’s another layout I recently created, using the same technique, adding paint to opposing corners and behind the cluster (click image for full credits)…

Next, I want to try using contrasting papers to really get that mixed media or art journaling look on my background and see what happens. If you try this technique, I’d really love to see it… link me up in the comments so I can leave you some love in the gallery.