Master the Brayer, Sensei.... or something.

*Bray-Urh* - "A brayer is a small hand roller, typically used in printmaking techniques to spread ink. They can be made of rubber, sponge, or acrylic and come in a variety of hardnesses for different applications." ~ From Wikipedia.org

Wicked little rolly thing that has had me freaked out about using it for ages. Not sure why I was afraid to just use the dang thing... it's basically the same thing as a paint roller, and Heaven knows, I sure have used those enough! It might be my dislike for messy, wet, goopy art projects.... lol! Whatever the reason my little red rubbery brayer has been sitting in my craft bins since I bought it way back in, uhm, well.... March. I saw some neat stuff in the Technique Junkies Newsletter and wanted to try them, but then never got around to doing it.

So last night I was chit-chatting with Jeanne on Gtalk (super program for you Gmail users) and we were talking bout something or other and somehow brayering came up and Jeanne pointed me to Michelle Zindorf's SCS blog.... oh my.... pass out. Brayer lover heaven. Brayer fearer help! YAY! I basically read through some of her posts and sat down and decided to play... YAYHOO!


Materials Used:
Erin's Creative Color Challenge
CTMH New Fallen Snow Stamps & Acrylic Blocks
CTMH Garden Green, Clear & White Embossing Powders
CTMH Chocolate, Crystal Blue, and Sweet Leaf Inks
CTMH Pewter brads
Somebody's generic white and chocolatey colored cardstocks
A heat gun and a brayer

Here are the first two prototypes... not exactly what I wanted, but they turned out pretty cool. Kinda like Batik.... remember when we rolled up our tshirts and tied them up with rubber bands and dyed them in high school so we could be cool? Ok, some of you may not remember that... but us 80's kids... well... anyway.

I basically just did the embossing powder resist technique. I random stamped and embossed the snowflakes until I had what I wanted for a design. Then I inked up my brayer and rolled it over the card. The ink didn't quite make it into all the tiny details of the snowflakes, so I sponged the ink into the details. I had a blast trying out something different and new, even if it was wet and messy, lol!


I finally achieved (sorta) what I wanted for the resist and richness in color for the snowflakes.... but something was missing, and I didn't want to fuss up the card with gobs of ribbon or anything, so I stamped a sentiment in chocolate ink and then marched back to the guest room to fetch some metal embellishments... pewter brads stuck in the middle of the snowflakes did the trick! I kept trying to tuck the sentiment in amongst the snowflakes, but the ink did not want to stick to the embossed snowflakes... perhaps next time I will try using StazOn for the sentiment.

I can't wait to see your take on the color challenge! Push yourself to try something new, new colors, a new product, or a new technique :)