Distress Paint Rust Effects - First Technique – TRUSTY RUSTY

  For the last month or so I have been trawling through all the “Rust” pins on Pinterest.  It makes me feel good that other people also think Rust is beautiful.  I love how rust looks and when I started expressing this little fetish publically – I always got skewed looks.  So finding rust-loving pinners made me feel wonderfully accepted. 

  Of course for a paper-crafter – if something is beautiful, you have to find a way to emulate that on paper.  That is what I am attempting here to show today.  I have experimented with a variety of techniques, but this technique that I am sharing today is my favourite.  I will be sharing the others at later dates on different posts.

  If you have Distress Paint, glue and some grit – it is almost too easy to do this effect as shown on the frame, accents and hinges card on the right. 

Today you have two options of getting the handle on this technique.  You can just click on the video below the text-tutorial and watch me demonstrate the process - or you can skip the video and just read the shortened cheat-sheet post right here with bonus pics and talk-throughs after it!

 Step one
Figure out what you want to “rust”. 
Even though I had that nice picture of a rusty pediment on the top there to show you how cool the rust effect is - for the purposes of this tutorial I am going to “rust” the posts from TIM HOLTZ ALTERATION’s Hardware Findings Die. 


Step two
If you want to – you can sponge on Rusty Hinge Distress Ink to create a rusty colour

Step  three
When tin or iron corrodes its starts to flake and bubble and get real gritty. 

To create the uneven surface of rusty metal - I put some glue down on the item – in the video the tube says Paint Appeal – but I just recycled the tube cos it has a nice pointy tip, and I have filled it heavy duty cold wood-glue. 

Now you’re going to need grit.  I bet you can use anything gritty – art sand, regular fine sand, even glitter flakes.  I took some fine table salt – blasted it in a coffee grinder to make it finer and then added Rusty Hinge Distress Ink (the refill ink not the stamp-pad if anyone is wondering how to do that).  I blended that in until I got a nice orangey hue.  This is optional because you will be painting over it anyway, but it is kinda fun to dye the salt.

The next step is to rub that on the piece that you have covered in glue. It doesn't have to be uniform and you dont even need to cover the whole piece in a layer of grit.  You just need enough to create some corrosion texture.

Step Four
Gather up all the Distress Paints you have with the colours that you want in your rust.  Usually rust has patches of ochre and red, orange and browns, sometimes a little blue-grey, sometimes even green.

For my piece I gathered up Barn Door, Rusty Hinge, Spiced Marmalade, Mustard Seed, Walnut Stain  and Tarnished Bronze.  I also got out the Weathered Wood for the oxidising finish.  I think Bundled Sage Distress Paint would be better but I dont have that yet.

Using your finger or cottonbud (Q-tip) or the “Tincan Tool” start creating your patches of corrosion by dotting/spotting/tapping the paint on and lightly blending it together.  Do this until you are happy with your rust pattern.

Step Five
The last step is giving it an oxidised look.  Rust that is outside in the elements sometimes develop a chalky blue-grey or green-grey oxidation, like how patina forms on brass statues or figures.  

To do that you just need a tiny amount of Weathered wood mixed with a bit Peeled Paint Distress Stain (If you dont have Bundled Sage Distress Paint like me)  or Bundled Sage Distress Paint.  Use your finger again to just dab on the tiniest amount here and there.  This step is optional but I really like how that constrasts with orange and ochre.

Step Six
This is another optional Step – but to keep the grit from eventually falling off etc, you might want to hit it with a blast of matt finish fixing spray.  I dont think its too big a deal though and you can skip this step.

So that concludes the technique bits – now let me show you the other cool bits of the card.



To get the metalworked Rusty effect –as in on the frame of the card – I ran Rusty Hinge Distress Ink all over a piece of cardstock and then embossed it with the sizzix alterations Regal Flourishes texture fade.  I applied a “rooibos” rust to the frame. Rooibos (literally translates into “Red Bush” in English) is a type of tea in South Africa that brews to a gorgeous red colour, I cut open a teabag, poured the contents into a coffee-grinder and mixed some of it into clear matt glaze medium.  The dye in the tea starts to migrate a little and this I thought creates a pretty cool effect.  I think you could use ground up Hibiscus Tea for this as well – it might yield a very pinky-red stain though.

The next cool thing I loved doing was faux pyrography.

If you dont know what pyrogaphy is – it is the art of burning designs into wood with a heating unit.  I tried to do this with that soldering iron I spoke about in my last post but I couldnt steady my hand enough to write legibly on the popsicle stick so I did the next best thing.  First I stained the popsicle stick with Rusty Hinge Distress Ink.  I wrote on it with an embossing stylus using as much pressure as I could to create an indentation without actually breaking the stylus.  Then I traced in the indentations with the fine tip of the Walnut Stain Distress Marker, I might hace also gone over with Black soot – I cant really remember – but defo on the Walnut Stain.
  
This card is for a sweet old guy who had an accident on his farm while working and he was beat up pretty painfully, so he was in need of a get well card. I loved the idea of a fuse to fire up recovery. I go around looking for all kinds of things that people usually throw away.  This fuse came from the rubbish bin of a mechanic, one of my best random-scavenger-days ever. The Heart was originally a pastel pink button that I painted with Fired Brick, Barn Door and I crackled that and then rubbed Tarnished Brass Distress Paint all over it.  I painted White Picket Fence on the glass bit of the burnt out fuse and then tried to write:  “Love is the best medicine” on it – that was hard cos I had to write so microscopically – I am going to have to practise my fairy-sized writing skills.

I was really looking forward to using the map stamps that I have – they are pieces from a bunch of different sets.  I gave them the ol’ Distress Marker and waterbrush blending treatment.  So loved how it turned out. 

Alright, time to wrap up this post.  Like I mentioned earlier – I have experimented with other techniques to create rust, I will be posting other rust effect tutorials on these techniques as well.  I am also super keen on following through with my promise to deliver the forged-gold tutorial and the Stone-texture tutorial – all totally possible with just a few colours of incredible Distress Paint – bookmark this blog, follow by email or through an RSS feedburner to make sure that you get in on it first.

Thanks for checking this out.

Once upon a time in Texas – Turn paper into Galvanised Steel with Distress Paint!

 I accidentally discovered a pretty neat painting technique while messing around with Distress Paint.  It is so super cool that I can barely wait to show it to you. 

I have the good fortune of being loved and spoiled by a dear sweet lady who owns a few ranches in Central Texas.  Last year around this time of year, her son took me out for  a fantastic “off-road” trip all over one of their ranches.  It was there that I took this picture on the left.   There are so many good memories and feelings attached to this day that whenever I look at this picture it almost feels that I am drawn back to the delirium of that time – albeit now - a little more wistfully.

So since I am in a bit of a melancholic reverie - I have decided that I am going to create something inspired by this picture to demonstrate the process of creating a Galvanised steel effect on paper. 
The element that I am going to be galvanising is that awesomely gnarly windmill.   

I drew/created/ made the windmill shape in MAKE THE CUT. I am going to also turn the old rickety barn and horse trailer into a “stamp” by tweaking it in GIMP. This is purely so that I have an excuse to do more Distress Marker-watercoloring. 

I am also going to show with you my cool new tool that I call the Tincan tool.  I am so convinced that it is the next best tool for everything that involves nickity pickety work that I am patenting it.

To create the galvanised steel paint effect:

You’re going to need Distress Paint in Black Soot, White Picket Fence, Weathered Wood and Brushed Pewter. 
  

You are also going to need some kind of applicator that makes a rectangular or square pattern because galvanised steel has a little bit of a cross hatched look as opposed to brushed metal or chrome metal. 

As you will  see in the video tut below– I also used the “Tincan tool”, which I will show you how to make and threaded on 2 foam squares – but you could just as easily punch out foam squares with a square punch or even just cut itsy bitsy teensy ones with a scissors….or a bush knife if you’re hard core like that.

 Here is a handy 3 and a half minute video demonstrating the process.

and a few pictures of the final project in the making –

I designed and cut out a windmill shape  on MTC -  see on the top right of this post for the finished galvanised windmill.



I manipulated the original photo (pictured at the top of this post) in GIMP and turned it into a stamp or colouring book type image (right).  I prefer to manually “create” the stamp in GIMP because I can manipulate the adjustments wherever and however I want it to be – for instance I want some areas less speckly and other areas sharper.  So GIMP is the best fit for me for this control-freaky reason.  However to get to a point where you can start tweaking like this is a bit of a learning curve, so if you want to skip all the frustrating figuring out - try Photoshop beause it has an automatic stamp filter, the old Windows 95 Picture editor(downloadable now as a stand-alone programme) can turn an image into a stamp.

There is a free programme called Irfan View that also has a filter that will turn an image into a stamp.  The con is that you get an automatically rendered stamp filter that is not as “malleable’ as when you do it manually – layer by layer, pixel by pixel.  

I used Distress Markers to colour and blend in the image to make it look somewhat like a comic book image.  I used Distress Ink on the back ground and painted clouds etc with a waterbrush, that is what gives it that batik type of effect.

 

I filled in the trees freehand with my favourite type of textural paint.  It is product called Puff Paint by Dala (I have blogged about this before over here - DALA PUFF PAINT )*edited to add - Dala Puff Paint is like Marvy Uchida's Liquid Applique, but cheaper, more value for buck and faster working - with a hairdryer I can get it puffing in a matter of minutes whereas with Liquid Applique - you have to let it set for a couple of hours. 

I decided to turn this little piece of stamped colouring book art into a Gratitude Journal for the lady I talked about above.  I thought it would be fitting because she told me that she loved this ranch and she is such a dear soul, so full of love, positivity and she notices beautiful things and beautiful words and phrases.  So I knew if anyone would keep a Gratitude Journal – it would be her.  I wound up making two versions of the journal – because I messed up the first one (here on the right)  by glueing it down all crooked and I also felt like the perspective was off in terms of the overly large windmill.  I am so anal about stuff like that, that I couldn’t bring myself to be happy with that.

So I made a new book, re-coloured the barn etc and recut the windmill in a smaller scale.  This meant that I lost some of the cool detail because my cutter cant handle tiny cuts that well, but it was good enough.  I embossed the barn and trailer part of the image with a generous layer of UTEE.  I then used an old handwritten text stamp from a Chiswick line  to balance out the stark contrast of the focal elements of the image by kinda watermark stamping.  I added a little “label” particular to the receiver of the gift.  I was now super happy with the final project. 

 What do you think bloggin’ buddies?  Does it work for you?  I’d love to see all the cool stuff that you create using this technique please send me a link if you do upload a project and I will add the link to this post.  Stay tuned for the next installment of Distress Paint Metal FX!!!

DISTRESS Paint was conceptualised by the amazingly talented Graphic designer Tim Holtz.  Click here-->  TIM HOLTZ DISTRESS PAINT to go to the product info which also contains a swatch of all the colours in the range - Click here-->  TIM HOLTZ DISTRESS PAINT VIDEO DEMO to link to Tim Holtz demonstrating the basic qualites of Distress Paint.  I am not paid or sponsored by Tim Holtz or Ranger – I just really love these products.