Halloween Distress Ink Background with Sarah

Hello scrappy friends, Sarah here again with another easy but effective background for you to try. As you can see on my October Halloween scrapbooking layout, I have used two shades of blue in the Tim Holtz Distress Ink range - The base is Faded Jeans and the stenciled colour is Chipped Sapphire. First step is to take your lighter colour and apply it all over your cardstock. It's a good idea to make sure your ink pad is nice and juicy - mine was not so it took a while to get adequate coverage all over the cardstock I was using. For older ink pads, I found a few spritz of water can help revive it a little. For this layout however, I liked the look of some of the white cardstock showing through so full coverage didn't bother me.

The second step is to dry off your page - distress inks tend to stay wetter for longer. Mine was quite damp in places as I was spritzing water on my ink pad throughout the process.

The third step is to find a stencil you want to use - this one is called Rustic Paint from The Crafters Workshop and I liked how it gave the cracked, almost lightening bolt effect on my background. I chose dark colours to keep in line with the darker shades of the Halloween mood board. I secured my stencil on top of the cardstock with some washi tape around the sides. This assists to hold it in place as I apply the second layer of ink. Using a blending tool, I took the 'Chipped Sapphire' ink and applied this over the stencil.

Keep going until the whole stencil area is covered

The last step is to remove the washi tape and lift up to see you fantastic background! Dry this off with your heat tool to set the colour.

That's as easy as it is! You can of course add further texture, stamping, washi tape etc to your background as required. I hope you enjoyed this tutorial and I look forward to seeing the backgrounds you create using this technique!