Pigment Powders!

When I first saw Ken Oliver's Color Burst pigment powders, I thought "eh, I have enough water based paints to last me into my dotage, why this now?" Ah, but then the dastardly YouTube showed me the way. Oh! So I ordered the first 6 colours, (because I am, alas, a complete-ist, and there was a good price on the lot), and I found a home for them in the craft room, but did not have the chance to play. When the next 6 came out for good deal, I said, well, okay since I am ordering stuff anyway, throw that in there.
And then I started playing. And I wanted more. But Ken didn't have more, so I discovered that another brand had been around a while, and Magenta had just come out with their own called Nuance. So I hunted around for the best prices on the Brushos, (Forgive me, the site of the manufacturer of Brushos is classically bad;  - if you want a better look check out the DickBlick site) and decided to make my first order directly off the Magenta site.
When they all arrived I went to town. Stuck then into a good bin, and started swatching.

All of them use the same principle of highly pigmented granules of powder that react with water. And as you can see with my yellow-orange-brown range, the more complex the colour the more complex the formula of granules. So, a primary colour like the lemony yellows on the left don't have a lot of different colours in them. The more you move into tertiary colours the more different colours go into making that one, like the browns on the right.

If I had to choose one brand of these I like the best, It is probably the Ken Oliver's Color Bursts. Why? Because he managed to create enough different colours in a simple selection, and the container is probably the easiest to use. Screw on cap, just tap it onto the paper.

Brushos are nice, but as I said above, the site is really NOT aimed at the crafting industry. And frankly a lot of the colours are alike. While their container holds a good amount, the original idea is to OPEN the container and take what you need. I noticed a lot of demos suggest you punch a hole in the top and simply store it with a poster pin in it. But they don't even include a colour swatch, so I had to use my swatches to punch out a circle of colour and glue it to the top of the lid.

The Nuances are also pretty gorgeous. They are not mentioned that often on sites or YouTube, as they are not yet as popular. But the Magenta blog has numerous lovely samples. But again, the container comes with a lid to take off - I used the poster pin method with those too. Magenta has always been one of my very favourite stamp brands.

(and then I found another brand, called Bistre from France, but you can either buy this one by the baggie or in humongous containers. Limited to 10 colours and to more antique looking tones).
The best illustrations all around for the pigment powders were the PaperArtsy blog entry (it's a topic for the next bunch of entries - enjoy!) and Julie Fei-Fan Balzer's youtube demo for Color Burst. There are plenty for ColorBurst or Brushos, but this one covered a lot of techniques.

Then, I tried them with GLOSSY ACCENTS.

This was going off on my own, since I didn't see anything about this on blogs or videos.

First I took a bunch of thick cardboard geometric shapes that I have on hand (I use my Vagabond die cut machine and a bunch of those thick Sizzix steel rule dies and regularly cut the shapes from very thick cardboard).

Painted them with an off-white acrylic paint.

Globbed on the Glossy Accents glue until I had the whole surface generously covered. Fluff on some pigment powders and pull them around in the glue with a pin. Let them sit. Go away or you'll be tempted to play with them like I did - it ends up looking a little messy. My first attempts started bending the cardboard because of all the moisture of the glue. So I stuck them to the craft sheet with double sided tape or the whole goop would start sliding off the piece.

Results: I think I used too much pigment powder because it continued to move and spread after it sat.
The ones on top were the first tries - the ones below were done with a lighter touch of the powder.

Not bad. Then I played with one and it CRACKED! So I cracked it some more, put my favourite homemade antiquing solution (brown acrylic paint and a fixative - usually Glossy Accents or anything else that can make a clear glaze) to make the cracks more obvious.

After that I took the one I thought came out the very darkest (and I didn't like - way too much pigment) and cracked it. Antiquing wouldn't work for this one, so I took a gilding wax (I can't remember which one, but I think it was the Decoarts one) and rubbed it very lightly. The picture shows the same piece with slightly different lighting.

Another technique I had been eager to try was with shrink plastic. We use a lot of shrink plastic - my daughter makes pop-culture jewellery to sell at Anime Conventions. I keep all the scraps though, and most of the scraps are of the pre-sanded transluscent kind. I put a piece (or a bunch of little pieces together) on the craft sheet (I recommend putting the craft sheet on a non-plastic clipboard)
and heat it with the heat tool until it is very very soft and doesn't move around anymore - when the piece has finished shrinking - while it is still hot, bang a rubber stamp with a good deep image on it. Background stamps are ideal for this - (I don't recommend using clear stamps because of the heat)  So you end up with things like this.

 Some of the colour is because they are scraps and may have lines or colours from whatever we were originally creating. Doesn't matter.

So I puffed a few colours of pigment powder in a plastic palette and then added the glossy accents. Be sure that when you turn the GA bottle upside down that you shake, so that there is no air that comes out first before the glue. That puff of air will throw all the pigment powder out of the resevoir!

Mix it up with tooth picks and use a disposable paint brush to brush it on your shards.

Nice eh? I must confess that this is a very old technique I learned years ago at a crafting workshop. And to make them even more cool, put that gilding paste on them! I tried a number of different brands, but they didn't really look very different so use your favourite brand.

So now I had left over GA+PP mixture. Oh look! I had some samples of craft aluminum (backed with cardstock) I'd run though the vagabond with an embossing folder. Lets slop some of this goop on them!

I sanded back the top one.The bottom one I'd painted the middle element red and the ones on either side a brilliant yellow, waited for them to dry then used a light brown over the whole thing to antique it.

Oh, and by the way, instead of using water to spray on the granules, try using Rangers Perfect Pearls Mist in Biscotti or in their sheer colour "Perfect Pearl".

Okay, so that's it - my brain dump on pigment powder (lots of toothpicks and Glossy Accents used). Now the tough part - to incorporate all my lovely bits into a greater art object. Stay tuned....