Create Your Own Background Paper

Don’t have the colors or pattern of background paper you want to use for your project? Create your own.

Or maybe you just want to spend some time playing with shaving cream and being creative.

Playing with Texture

• Did you ever use finger paints to create art?
• How about playing with slime?
• or clay?
• or baking and really getting your hands in the bread dough?

Do you like the idea of playing with different textures and seeing what amazing and creative art you come up with?

To be honest, I don’t love to get dirty for any reason. I remember disappointing my Grandma when I was little because I wouldn’t make mud pies with her. I actually wore the plastic gloves they brought me when eating a seafood boil yesterday with crab legs and shrimp. Crab legs are my favorite food, but I don’t like getting my hands dirty.

I don’t love getting my hands a little messy while doing this marbling technique. But, I love how it turns out so much that I’m willing to put up with a little mess. And, the fact that the shaving cream leaves my hands and office smelling so good for awhile doesn’t hurt either.

When I was creating this background paper, I tried to minimize the mess as much as possible.

Shaving Cream Marbling Technique

• First, I put shaving cream on a sheet pan.
• Then, I added drops of Night of Navy, Gorgeous Grape, and Highland Heather re-inker.
• Next, I used a butter knife to swirl the re-inker throughout the shaving cream.
• Then, I laid some Basic White paper into the shaving cream.
• Finally, I picked up the paper, scraped the excess shaving cream off with the butter knife and laid the paper on a clean baking sheet to dry.

I was so happy with the way my paper turned out, I decided not to only use it for the background paper. I also used it to cut out my rotating wheel and cloud dies. As the wheel rotates, you can see three different trick or treaters in their cute costumes.

I decided to enter this card in the Just Add Ink challenge this week. I picked clouds and stitched as my pick 2. The dies from the Give It a Whirl stamp set are stitched. And, although my clouds are diecut from my marblized paper and kind of blend in to the night, they are there. In fact, I stamped my sentiment on one of the clouds.

Check out another card using the Scary Cute Halloween stamp set.
Life Is Hard

Click here to see and purchase products used to create this card.

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