2015 #15 Gel Resist {By Ellen Vargo}

 2015 Topic 15: Gels and Mediums

Hi everyone Ellen Vargo here, joining you this evening with a post about using gels medium as a resist. I have always loved a good resist technique, and gels work beautifully. We'll be working with gloss gel medium, distress inks, collage, and some of my favorite PA stamps.

Step One: Use a brayer to apply gloss gel medium to your stamp.  I used a brayer because the stamp I chose, the scratchy diamond background stamp from EEV07...

...has a very fine texture and I wanted nice crisp stamping.  If you are using a bolder stamp you could either lightly paint the gel medium onto the stamp, or spread the gel medium onto your craft sheet and lightly stamp into it.

Step Two: Let gel medium dry or speed things up by using a heat tool.  Then use ink blending tools to apply your choice of distress inks over the stamped gel medium.  The gel medium will "resist" the distress inks, which are water based and translucent, leaving a nice clean stamped image intact.

Step Three:  Next I applied some tissue paper, stamped with one of my favorite dotty texture stamps (EEV06).

I used Ranger Glue N Seal, another type of medium, for this step, It's slightly looser and thinner than the Golden regular matte gel, and so it dries flatter and more invisible. With Golden's regular gel you would still see brush strokes, less so with the Golden soft gel. All of these products have a nice matte finish that will vanish once dry.

Step Four:  I created some flowers using maps and my petals and pods stamp set (EEV09). 

I glued the petals to the circle base using glossy accents, yet another type of medium which can be used as an adhesive or as a way to give a shiny finish to any embellishment.  

The flower stems were stamped using just the stem from my sketched flowers stamp set (EEV10).

Step Five:  After adding a torn strip of map paper to the base of the card, I then added a quote from Lin Brown's ELB06.  I stamped the quote on white Smoothy card, cut out the words to fit the arrangement I wanted, adhered to card and outlined each word with a fine tip black pen.  I decided to add little white dots (Sharpie fine tip paint pen) to the center of each black dot to make them "pop" - I use this technique a lot - one of my faves.

And, once again, here is the final result.  I outlined the whole card with a black paint pen to give it a nice finished look.

I hope you liked today's project and if you haven't ever tried using gel medium as a resist, then give it a try!  You could use distress inks as we've done today, or you could use watered down paint.  I have had success with both methods, but distress inks give a cleaner, crisper result, in my experience.  

Thanks so much for stopping by today.  Have fun playing!  ~ ellen.

Wow your resist really pops to show the fine detail of that gorgeous diamond scratchy stamp Ellen! It's so lovely to see how you use the fantastic 'petals' set of stamps with the map to make such cool flowers. Thanks for joining us tonight, we love to see your bright and cheerful projects! ~Leandra

We would love you to join in with challenge #15: Gels If you are inspired by any of our guests who blog with us over the fortnight, then please join in and link up your creativity HERE. 

All links go in the draw to win a voucher to spend on products of your choice from the PaperArtsy online store. The Gels link will close 17:00 (London Time) Sunday, Aug 23rd winner will be announced 2 hours later at 19:00.