It's a Blogiversary Celebration ~ Day 3 of Technique Tutorials

Hello, again! It's our third day of technique tutorials and today I'm going to show you how to make a Galaxy Background. I'm sure you've seen these beautiful backgrounds!! I love them! Let's get started!

First, I pulled out four distress inks for this technique - Black Soot, Dusty Concord, Seedless Preserves, and Picked Raspberry. I also grabbed two blending tools and a piece of white card stock from Papertrey Ink. You are also going to want to work on a surface that you can wipe clean or one that you can replace like my grid paper pictured.

I started with the lightest color, the Picked Raspberry. I got my blending tool nice and inky, but to avoid an obvious circle when I start blending I dab the sponge off once. Now with a circular motion I lightly blended some ink in the center of the card stock. 

Now onto the next color, Seedless Preserves... I got the blending tool nice and inky, and then with the same circular motion I blended this color around the first color. At this point in the blending it's okay that the color is lighter because we'll be adding more and we don't want it too dark.

Now we'll be basically repeating the last step again with the Dusty Concord ink. This time we'll blend ink all the way around to the outer edge.

Now, onto the Black Soot ink... with the same circular motion, I just blended the black ink around the outer edges. 

Now I did the same things again... I blended a bit of the pink in the middle and then added some of the lighter purple blending it a bit more with the pink. I went back over with the darker purple blending it into the lighter purple and into the outer black edges. I also did a little bit more blending with the black on the edges but it really didn't need much.

For some reason, this is my favorite part... haha!.. the water splatter!! I sprayed just a little bit of water in my hand and then clapped my hands over the paper. I let it set for just a few seconds and then laid the paper towel on the card stock to soak up any excess. Since I'm not using watercolor paper, I've found that it's important to use the paper towel to soak up that excess water. Otherwise, the card stock could warp and that would just be terrible after all that work blending the inks. 

Now, I grabbed my palette... it's well loved, but clean. Haha! I added just one little drop of white acrylic paint. That's it, just one tiny drop!

I then sprayed that little tiny drop of paint with a little bit of water. Not too much, just enough to make it easy to splatter.

For this technique I just use a cheap paint brush. One that my kids would use for their watercoloring. Nothing fancy at all... I used the brush to mix the paint with the water.

I love to splatter so I have a box just for this purpose. I keep a paper towel in the bottom of my splatter box to catch the extra wet stuff. It may be time to change out this paper towel. :) I placed my card stock in the box and grabbed the palette.

Now, the fun part... splatter!! I dipped my paint brush in the mixture and flicked it. You'll see that some of the splatter is bigger and some is teeny tiny... that all depends on how wet your paint brush is and/or how hard you flick the paint brush. You may want to practice this step on some scrap pieces before trying it on your background.

After doing the paint splatter, I set it aside and let it dry. I think in this picture you can see that after the paint dried, the white splatter is a bit brighter.

Now for the card I created using the Galaxy Background... I love it!! I die cut the background using the Blueprints 31 dies from My Favorite Things. I adhered that to a True Black card base and set it aside. I have just been itching to ink up this new owl stamp from Unity called Everyday Wonderful Owls. Isn't it the cutest!! I colored it in using Copic markers {0, N0, N1, N3, N4, E95, E99, V05, V06, V09, Y06, Y11, Y13, Y15, Y35} and then I fussy cut it out. I then stamped the sentiment from Unity's February 2017 Kit of the Month called Unexpected Places in VersaMark ink and heat embossed it in white. I die cut that piece using the Blueprints 14 die that just happens to be a part of my giveaway mentioned on my Happy Blogiversary post. I adhered the sentiment and the owls to the card and then decided to add a few drops of Violet Galaxy Nuvo Crystal Drops. 

And there you have the final technique tutorial for my Blogiversary Celebration!! Thank you so much for joining me for these tutorials. I've had a lot of fun doing them for you and I do intend on doing more in the future!

Please leave a comment letting me know what you thought and if you haven't already, click on the Follow button on the right hand side so you won't miss my next post... it just may be another technique tutorial!! 

 Did you comment on my Happy Blogiversary post for your chance to win a prize?!  Check out the details ---> here! Today is the last day to enter!!

If you missed the first technique tutorial, you can find that ---> here.

And the second technique tutorial can be found ---> here.

Thanks for stopping by!

See ya next time.

~ Crystal