Tactile Textures

This week’s Visible Image DT theme is Textured Layers and my brief was for a CAS card.  It’s tricky getting a lot of textures onto a CAS card but I like to do it using die-cut shapes, where a variety of textures can be used separately on each piece.  I chose to use hexagons as I like that they tesselate but other shapes will work well although you may have to overlap them.

To begin, I coloured a strip of the Destination Anywhere PET Tape using Aquamarine and Pistachio alcohol inks and set it aside to dry. 

I sprayed a piece of card with Mermaid Lagoon and Cracked Pistachio Distress Spray Stains and finished with a light mist of Unchartered Mariner Distress Spritz.  Whilst that was drying, I die-cut the Framed Fibres die from Arden Creative Studios navy card and adhered it to another navy panel that I’d covered with a sheet of double-sided adhesive. 

Next, I die-cut the sprayed panel, trying to keep the die-cut pieces in the die as much as possible.  The die was placed over the top of the navy Framed Fibres and I poked the bits out of the die straight into their respective holes on the adhesive sheet to make an inlaid die-cut panel. 

The sprayed Framed Fibres die-cut was adhered to a piece of navy card, from which I die-cut hexagons. 

More hexagons were die-cut from white card and I used Distress Grit Paste through the Mesh Numbers stencil.  Whilst the paste was still wet, I applied silver embossing powder and heat-set it so that the paste bubbled up and became really textured.

I silver heat-embossed the compass from Change Direction on white card and then got busy die-cutting the hexagons from all the panels I’d made. 

To assemble the card, I arranged the hexagons on a square card blank, leaving small gaps between them and having a few overhanging the edge.  Some hexagons were glued directly onto the card and a few were popped up on foam tape for dimension.  After trimming off the overhanging hexagons, the sentiment from Affirmations was stamped directly onto the card using Versafine Clair Twilight.