July Tag - Inspired by Tim

Shimmer and Shine from Rock Candy Distress Paint

When Tim Holtz posted his July tag this month I was mesmerized. I loved the tag and loved his new technique that I had never seen before. This month Tim used a brayer to apply Distress Stains and the effect is amazing. Since seeing his tag, I've been playing around with different color stains on a white background and yellow and having a blast. Tim also used Rock Candy Distress Paint with stains. This is one of my favorite techniques and even though Tim has shown before and I can't get enough. If you want to see Tim's July tag and read his wonderful tutorial with step by step pictures click here.

Distress Stains applied with brayer.

I was reading and scrolling through Tim's tutorial, looking at all his amazing pictures as I usually do when I came to the end and saw he had posted the winners from June. I could not believe it when I saw my name. Mario even emailed me a new badge for my blog! When I told my daughter I won, she asked me what did I win. I told her I didn't know but it was one of Tim's products so it would be wonderful. If you haven't guessed by now I am a big Tim Holtz fan. My prize came today and I was right. Mario sent me Tim's Mini Blueprints 2 CMS 146. This set has 12 mini stamps including one of our Flag, The Statue of Liberty, USA and a Star. Perfect for the red white and blue tag I was trying to create for the July challenge. Needless to say once I started to work with my new stamps and following Tim's techniques, the tag took on a life of its own.

As usual I didn't have everything that Tim used, so some of the things I did a little differently. I stamped the images (instead of die-cutting an image) on Grunge paper with Archival Jet Black Ink and after the Rock Candy Distress Paint had dried applied the Distress Stain with a brush to the flag because of the smaller details in the stamp. I applied the stains directly to the other images with the dauber. I trimmed out the images with my tonic scissors. I stamped the flag and statue in black on the background so I wouldn't lose the blueprint lines. Then glued the cut out images on top using Glossy Accents.  The white stripes in the Flag and the highlights on The Statue of Liberty were added with Picket Fence Distress Marker. I also used some paper from Tim's Seasonal Paper Stash and Pewter Distress Crackle Paint on the Grungeboard stars and the Idea-ology star.

I had so much fun working on my tag. I hope you check out Tim's tag and participate in the challenge for July.