Yesterday on my Instagram account , I shared a picture of a daily page in my personal planner that was completely covered in ink.

 

This is such a fun and easy technique!  If you haven’t tried it, you should! For this page I used Distress Inks, which have some pretty cool properties – but you can try this with any inks you have.

You will need some sort of applicator – a foam square, finger dauber, etc… my favorite are the round mini ink blending tools from Ranger. Ink up the foam on your ink pad and then gently rub the applicator onto your page in a circular motion.  It will be very faint at first… build up the color slowly in layers to get a nice even application. You can overlap colors to get some cool blends, like I did with these yellows, blues and greens.

You can cover the entire page with this process, like I did here, or you can just start at one end and fade out to white for a cool ombre effect.  Another fun idea is to MASK off an area and just apply some ink blending in one spot (see the video I posted yesterday for some masking tips!)

Over a year ago, I made a whole YouTube video that shares this ink blending technique in much greater detail.  If you’d like to check it out – click HERE.

Remember how I mentioned that Distress Inks have unique properties?  Well one of the cool tricks you can do is sprinkle some water over your inked page.  The water re-activates the ink and lifts some of the color… you can dab it with a paper towel and get a cool water-stained texture on your background.  To make it even more extra special, I added a bit of Perfect Pearls powder to my water before I spritzed my page (I mixed it in this mini mister from Ranger).  That makes those water stains have a cool pearlized shine – you can see it better in the second picture below! Awesome!

At this point you can decorate your page as you normally would (make sure your ink is dry first… the time can vary depending on the type of ink you use). I did some stamping with my Hero Hues black ink for bold contrast.

Go ahead and use stickers, gel pens, washi or whatever you like to complete your page!

I wanted a few shots of pink so I stamped, colored, and fussy cut a cute flower image for my bottom corner and added a few pink stickers from Michelkin Designs and voila!

I hope you’ll give this fun technique a try!

See you soon 🙂

xo,

Tricia