 Hi there, Sandy Olnok, artist and paper crafter here on YouTube and I'm going to share some playtime that I had recently with my Distress crayons. A lot of folks I think have forgotten how to play so I'm going to show you how I do. I got out the Patchwork stamp set from Tim Holtz and the tiles and mosaics, these are both backgrounds, and my Misty and started stamping on some Kansan XL watercolor paper. It's the really inexpensive stuff so it's just for playtime and if it comes out great I'll use it on a card if not it's just paper. So I'm stamping them with the Misty but I'm taking out the pad you'll see inside because with the Misty you want to make sure that you're not fighting the pressure of it. If you have too much height in there then you're not going to get a good stamped impression and I'm still only going to get a somewhat good stamped impression because I am stamping challenged I've said that before but for this experiment for this playtime these worked just great. I'm just applying lots of good pressure right on the stamp itself to get as good an image as I can and then removed my little tape that I held it in with since I can't use the magnets and then I wanted to show you how I clean the stamps because they're so detailed it's really hard sometimes to get all that ink out of all the nooks and crannies but this ultra clean and a little rag just a little terry cloth washcloth works perfectly you can get these rags in the auto supply section of the store really cheap. Now the other stamp set I decided I'm going to emboss so I've stamped them with VersaMark which is a clear ink that's kind of sticky so I can add on embossing powder so I'm going to use some gold and silver wow embossing powder on these other two pieces on the other two stamp sets that I'm going to use I can set this aside once it's got the powder on it and stamp the other one so I get the heat gun out and get it heated up all at once and as long as it's just sitting there it's you can wait for a while before you start heat setting it and so now I'll get the silver one all on there and get it covered and then I can put both of my embossing cutters back into their containers and reuse the excess and next heat it up this is my Wagner heat gun and it works great to zap them and just watching the embossing powder melt it's just so much fun so I've got this the gold one done now the silver one you can see my stamping is not perfect and since this was playtime I wasn't worried about it if the pieces came out great super if they didn't that's okay too I've taped them down to a piece of hard board now these are the ones that are not embossed with just the ranger jet black archival ink and I just started putting colors into various hexagons on the small one I decided to do the cool colors on one and the warm colors on the other so I'll use the blue the green and the purple on the left and the the red the yellow and the orange on the right and they are named with the distressed colors if you want to see all the colors available in the distressed crayons there is a chart on my blog so you can see all of those and decide which one of the sets you might want to pick up and try but then I'm using a baby wipe to move the color around with the distressed crayons and I'll link you to some videos at the end with lots more testing on the distressed crayons they move when you deliberately move them if you just leave it sitting there you can't spray it and make the water move everything you have to actually move it with a brush or your finger or something so I'm moving it with the baby wipe which is adding some moisture as if you were using a brush but it's using my finger so I'm getting a little more pressure and then once it's on there it's kind of set a little bit so wiping across it if you if you did that on distressed inked color it would totally mush but on this I could just wipe across it and lighten all that color real quickly and the color generally stays put but let me use my cool color or my cool color somebody's my warm colors over here on the other side and just randomly put some in there and I'm scribbling see like this is playtime and I was not going to get all crazy about it because if this didn't work if my techniques weren't making me happy it can just go in the circular file but if it comes out great then super I'm just moving the color around again with the little baby wipe and if you want to keep the colors pure then just change the spot for your baby wipes you keep your yellows yellow that sort of thing by doing that and just keep moving it around and then when you're done just quick wipe over the whole thing and it will get kind of some smoothness going to all of it and lighten up some of that color here's the ones that were embossed and I decided to try something a little different with them the first I was going to make a very regular pattern in here and then went yeah I don't feel like it this is playtime let's not get anal retentive about it so I just started putting some colors in there and I started thinking what what if I made them look like they were just kind of all mushing into each other behind that embossing that would be kind of fun when the distress crayons are still not fully dry before they've sat on there very long you can wish them with your finger a little bit but I thought well let me try the the baby wipe again and move the color around that way and see if I can really get them to blend and they do blend but the baby wipe does pick up color so it lifts color while it's actually moving it around and that's something I decided that I could play with so first I'm gonna just get all of the color mushed around entirely first and doing that with the baby wipe and you can see it's doing a fairly good job there's a few spots where it's not blended entirely but I wanted to go back and rework some of that anyway because it was lightening the color significantly and I wanted more color on this I wanted more intense color so on top of this damp distress crayon I'm coloring some more crayon colors and just adding more of the same so that I can get richer color and this time I'm just moving them with my finger because since there's a little moisture on the paper just slightly these are going to move and blend with my finger better this time because there's some moisture there that just has to be a small small amount and I was like oh now this is interesting that once there is some moisture so I needed to figure out a way to get just a little bit of moisture onto the paper and not a ton because a brand new wet baby wipe lifts up so much color but this actually kept the color on there and then I took a Kleenex and I dabbed it onto the wet baby wipe so that the Kleenex was just barely damp and that I could go very lightly across the surface and bring back the shine of the embossing powder so you can see how it sort of polishes it so I'm just using very very light pressure very very light don't push really hard or you're going to lift up color from inside all of those areas where you've just put all that beautiful color and this will allow the shine to come through as well as having rich color underneath and you could emboss probably over this over top of it if you wanted later however you'd have to make sure you wait until it was really dry because that distressed crayon would hold that embossing powder I think it would stick to it so be careful if you do that make sure you let it dry really really good before you do any stamping on top if you wanted to do embossing so this time I'm using my already learned learnings and I'm dampening my finger on the baby wipe so this time I didn't use the baby wipe underneath I'm just touching my finger to the the baby wipe just to add that moisture I wanted some more distinct blobs of color because it's sort of all mushed together with my finger so I'm just going to add a few sections of a couple of the different colors I wanted more the yellow and more the pink and then just started mushing them around and making sure that my finger was only containing the colors that I wanted to mush so I didn't turn it all back into one shade again and then did the same trick with the very very very lightly wet Kleenex and literally don't spray it just touch it to some water touch it to the baby wipe and that's enough to bring out the shine on the surface of the paper on that embossing powder so that was pretty cool to learn all of this about how I can play around with these distress crayons I cut my panels into rectangles that fit onto my cards so they're already and I just needed sentiments so I've taken some scrap pieces of black card stock and I'm prepping them with the ink and dinkadoo powder tool which I like better than the ek1 that I showed you before seems to put out more powder and be more protective of the paper then I stamped in VersaMark ink some stamps from clearly besotted and I wanted to do ombre embossing so I played around with how this would work and doing it the gold first on both of them I'll do one horizontal and one vertical and I had a couple pieces of scratch paper to catch the excess I set that one aside real quick so I could get the silver done you could do this in multiple colors you could do a whole rainbow of embossing if you just get yourself set up right and plan it ahead of time because then I can just add the second color to it and heat it up and ready to go and then just return all those excess bits of scrap embossing powder to their containers this is a great way to have a lot of fun with your sentiments now the hexes on the left on the patchwork background I did add some glossy accents too so I'd have some extra shimmer but I think this came out beautifully there's a couple of my other practice pieces they aren't the most gorgeous things that I've created but they were good enough that I thought putting them on a card with a nice sentiment would still work so don't throw away all your practice ones unless they're really awful but experiment with different colors of embossing powder different ways of applying the medium and see what happens so I encourage you to try on the left is a video that I did comparing different crayon mediums in the center is a distressed crayon piece of art that I did and on the right is an inky technique for making that starburst that I thought you might be interested in if you like getting your fingers dirty and using things like ink and crayons you can hit the subscribe button if you'd like to get more videos from me I could add about three a week and the supplies are all listed in the doobly see you guys next time