Kirsten’s Tuesday Tutorial – Chalkboard Technique

Good morning blog visitors, happy Tuesday to you all, I hope you had a great weekend.  This is the first of a new weekly photographic tutorial on the blog & Lisa & I hope you enjoy it.  I chose to do the chalkboard technique this week after helping a friend who wanted to try it.  I think she would be the first to say that it really is very easy to do.

First things first; the ingredients. 
You will need;

• Black card – not too light, about 250gsm
• Versamark ink (or similar embossing ink)
• White embossing powder
• White pens (or a white pencil)
• White ink
• Cut & dry foam

A word about white pens.  There are quite a few available.  I use either a Sakura pen or a Signo Uni-ball pen.  Both work very well for this technique & you can also use them over paints, distress inks, colours sprays, (Ranger Colourwash/Dylusions), but you must ensure that your inks, etc., are THOROUGHLY dry first, otherwise you’ll end up with  grey smudge.  The other thing I’ve learned is not to use a lot of pressure, the ink will flow quite easily if you’re not too heavy handed & if you wipe the nib with a clean piece of paper towel from time to time.

 

Stamp your focal image with the Versamark, cover with the white EP & heat set.  Note: I purposely didn’t use an anti-static pad beforehand, I wanted flecks of white to break up the black & make the ‘chalkboard’ look as if it’s been used previously.

Now you start to make the frame.  There’s a lot going on already with the swirls & flourishes of this image so I kept my frame very simple.  Start from the outside with a solid line all the way around.  The next line should be much closer to your focal image.  When that’s done you can decide where you want to add more decoration.  The trick is to leave plenty of black space.  All my decoration was done with the Sakura pen, but you’ll get a very similar result with a white pencil.

Next we want to add some 'chalk dust'.

Pick up a tiny amount of ink on the cut & dry foam & very gently dab it on under the writing.  Immediately use the other, clean end of the foam to rub off the excess ink.  Repeat on a few more areas.

If you don’t have a white ink pad, you can use white acrylic paint & a baby wipe to achieve the same result.

NB If you use paint to stamp with, make sure you wash it off your stamp immediately.

This is a scrap of the same black card.  I stamped the butterfly with the white ink twice first , then twice with Ranger’s Snow-cap paint dabber.  They’re almost identical.

That’s it.  The only thing left to do is mount your chalkboard piece onto something.  I dry embossed a piece of kraft card with the 6x6 Floral Frenzy folder & blended Vintage Photo distress ink on top.

I had some scraps of Graphic 45 papers left over from other projects, so I layered them & a piece of brown, textured paper onto a 8x8 white card blank.  (I covered the kraft Elusive Wings paper with Worn Lipstick distress ink).  I couldn't resist adding one of the Creative Expressions large ornate corners & the flowers were cut from another scrap of G45 paper.

 

 

               



That’s all for today.  Any feedback is much appreciated & if there’s a technique you’d like to see, please let us know in the comments.