Painting with Bleach and Luminarte Twinkling H2O's

A couple weeks ago I took a class with Jenn Shurkus, the creative chick, on painting with bleach on black card stock and then painting over the bleached areas with Luminarte's Twinkling H2O's to create a beautiful mottled stain glass effect.  You can see the cards I made during that class at the bottom of the post. I have been itching to play with all my lovely H2O's for quite some time now.  They have been reformulated, come in bigger containers and I have a whole mess of them that have been calling to me to start playing.  So, today I decided it was time to get my craft on and try this technique out at home.  

When I was looking around for some good candidates to stamp with and I found this gorgeous poinsettia stamp by Magenta I got last Christmas.  I ended up embossing it with a Versamark pad and some fine detail gold embossing powder since the leaves and petals were so intricate and fine.  Then I painted the whole thing with my standard issue grocery store bleach and sat down to wait.   

Now, the thing that's so hard about painting with bleach is that you don't exactly know how things are going to come out all the time.  your results can vary greatly depending on the bleach and card stock you are using.  I got pretty lucky with the card stock I bought today.  The bleach did work on it, but I wasn't totally happy with the amount of bleaching that occurred.  Compared to the painting I did in class with Jenn, the results today were much more subtle, which in turn made the final product look less like stained glass than I had hoped.  That's ok though, I'll just have to try out some different types of black card stock to see how they work.  I only had one option for paper today and considering, I'm reasonably happy with the results. 

Since the paper didn't lighten as much as I hoped, I ended up really layering on the H2O colors and trying to shade with them using some of the techniques I would normally use when working with copic markers such as shading by repeatedly going over one section after letting it dry.  I also was having a bit of a problem with my heat tool, which I use to emboss and dry the H2O's between coats.  It was the first time I had used it since I got it and it started smelling funny.  I looked carefully and the metal tip where the heat comes out was touching the protective covering around it rather than free floating.  I guess I'm going to have to invest in another heat tool soon... sadness.   

Anyway, if you want to learn more about Luminarte's Twinkling H2O's or their other products, you can check out the Luminarte Blog.  When I get better paper, I'll make sure to try this technique out again and share the results with you.