 Hi there, it's Sandy Alnok and today I'm going to talk about using Distress Inks versus Distress Oxide Inks for watercoloring. This is probably the deepest dive I've done with these two different types of inks. This is a sample card that I made. It's a little crazy. I went a little bit nuts. The new Purple Onion Designs release is so cute. It has all these buildings and little critters as always and great Stacey Aquila stamps. So if you're interested in seeing that there's a link over to Purple Onion so you can go see the new release. And yes, my card has an inside because I couldn't stop. I just kept going. I took the two ends of that scene and I glued them to the inside. So I really just painted the bookstore once and used both halves of it. So you could get two cards out of each one if you use that technique. So I'm going to make the simpler card. The one in the middle, that's the one I'm going to make today and just talk about the properties of the inks as we go. So it's going to not take like four hours to do like the other card did. Oh yeah, that was crazy. Anyway, I have stamped it onto Arches watercolor paper and I stamped it off to the side because I kind of like the idea of just having part of the book shop there, the bookstore and stamped a little newspaper salesman. And I put a wall in here just so that there's another element to anchor it to the ground. And I'm going to use some distress oxides first. Distress oxides feel kind of chalky. They look and paint kind of chalky, but they're really pigment in ink in there. They're a mixture of pigment and regular ink in there. So they they act a little bit differently. They're more opaque and that's so that you can use them on darker papers. Well, I'm not using them on darker papers. So what's the use of them on lighter papers? Well, they blend better and you may know that already since you probably use these much more than I do. This is like I said, my first real deep dive into using these. And I want to say a big thank you to Tim and Mario for putting together a big box for me because I have not had the reinker bottles for any of these. I've only had the ink pads because I've never even used the ink pads up enough that I needed to reink anything. So I have not had the reinkers. So they sent me a big box of them so I could play with them. Just a random selection of colors. So I'm using what's here. And I am painting the sky and these trees with the distress oxides because specifically in this instance, there's no stamping lines to worry about because these inks are opaque. I don't want to stamp very much, at least not with intense color, on top of anything that has lines in it because the opacity which is the kind of thing that makes them feel kind of chalky instead of transparent. The opacity is too high and it covers up the stamp lines and it makes your stamp lines look grayish if it shows them at all. Sometimes there's some areas in that crazy card where the lines just completely were eradicated because the ink just took over. So if you're using a nice big empty area, distress oxides are perfect for that because it's going to give you good coverage. It's easier to blend with them because of the the pigment properties of them and that sort of thing. Now this is the hickory smoke in regular distress ink because the hickory smoke in the distress oxide is that grayish color because as soon as you hit the pigment in those inks with water, they kind of have that that chalky thing that happens. They get lighter. So if you need to use a darker color, you're going to have to switch over to the regular distress inks because you're not going to get any really rich dark colors using distress oxides. Now this element, this wall back here is not an important one. So I can paint that very easily in the distress oxides because I don't care if those little lines in the wall fade and disappear a little bit because that is an unimportant element. So if you've got something you're trying to minimize, then by all means paint that in the distress oxides because it's going to help you to sort of mute that out so it's not as important and allow the important things to jump forward. So think about the areas in the stamping where you want nice crisp clear lines. Anywhere where there's detail, if you have a character in it, you want that to be really strong and you want everything else to get muted and you can see the clouds in the trees in the back are super soft and even though I'm getting more intense color in the wall because I'm putting a couple layers in there, it's still in that kind of muted way and then I'm using some of the ground espresso for the roof and I want you to look those lines disappear like all the lines in the roof are gone. I don't really care about that too much because the lines in the roof aren't all that important but if you want that roof to show if it's got a nice pattern in it, you might want to use the regular distress inks to do that. Down here I've got a little pot that isn't important so I painted that again with the distress oxides but now I switched to the regular distress to do the door and so I want to do a bunch of the elements on the bookstore with an ink that's transparent so you can see the lines through it it's not going to cover them up now of course if you use it really thick and heavy then anything is going to cover it up that's just the way color is if you use it really dark but as long as you use a little bit of water with it you're going to get a transparent look so that you can see all the lines through it that's what transparency is all about so that you can see what's under it and you wouldn't be able to see as much if you were using the distress oxides in this particular instance. I am using by the way a silver black velvet brush this happens to be a number 10 I didn't realize I grabbed the 10 I thought I grabbed the 12 but I realized partway through I was getting a lot of really good detail with this 12 like I've never really done that successfully before I usually would switch to my eight but if you're wondering why I'm still using the same brush it's because it's the 10 someone in between the 12 and the 8 that I normally use now for the the little poles here these these columns I'm using again the regular distress because I want to keep those those little caps on the columns I want to keep them nice and clear there's the word books I don't want that to be covered up so I don't want to use a distress oxide with it but now when we get to the window I can pink the blue over top and you'll be able to see that the the color looks like it's kind of blocking out part of the lines there's areas where they're getting grayed out it makes it look like those wooden slats are on the inside of the window not on the outside if you want it to look like it's on the outside then use a regular distress ink in that area because then it won't do that it won't gray them out but I was totally fine with doing that on both of the windows and the reason that I'm doing these angled lines is because in this window I'm painting right now there's two little lines that indicate a shine in the window so I want all of my lines to go the same direction whatever I'm doing reflections on now here's the newspaper on the other card this was one of the areas that I was like oh man I made a mess of that because I used the distress oxides here and you lost the impact that that was actually the stack of newspapers it didn't look like it it wasn't papers anymore it was just a blob but once I started using the regular distress inks I was able to retain some of the stamp detail underneath now here is an exception I didn't have any browns or any owl colors in the distress inks and I didn't feel like going get my pads out and everything so I'm using a very thin watered down version of the gathered twigs that I already had on my palette so I just put a bunch of water in it because it kind of becomes pretty transparent by doing that and here I can even take a little bit of it and run it over the columns and the sign in order to warm those up because it's so thin but even if you use it thin just be really careful because it has the tendency to just kind of cover things up a little bit now the other color that I'm trying to use here I was wishing that I had thought to make it a little bit lighter than this but I'm using the regular distress ink in the hickory smoke to try to do the second color on the owl and I didn't test it out first should have done that and it was too dark but distress inks don't lift so I tried dabbing it off I got a little bit of lift but it doesn't lift very much it's one of the reasons I like regular water color because it'll lift a lot better and I make a lot of mistakes and I have to lift a lot of color so if you have that kind of problem you may want to make sure that you're using a pigment a color a hue whatever whatever kind of medium you're using something that will lift up so I decided I would increase the contrast around everything else in the owl to try to minimize the fact that my owl went so gray because I couldn't lift the color out and there we go there's my finished card so I hope this was helpful if you've been confused about these two types of inks and when you might and might not use them there's individual pictures of the crazy card over on my blog if you want to get more detail on that there's lots of silliness going on in that one but thank you very much for tuning in subscribe if you have not yet already make sure you hit the all not the personalized when you hit the little bell to make sure that youtube sends them to you I just found out recently that the little personalized button only sends you occasional videos so if you've been missing me that might be why I will see you guys again very soon take care bye