Glue pen Tracing-embossing & Distressed Stamp Embossing

The white embossing on this simple card is done without stamping. I'm thrilled to be doing glue pen embossing with these gorgeous patterns I found. Feels like a whole new world of crafting without spending money! (You just need a little cardstock & printer ink, a gluepen & embossing powder.)

Glue pen Tracing-embossing

The first step to making this pattern into a template for embossing in white (or any other embossing powder) is to lighten it. These particular patterns start out very dark:

If you want to emboss in white or save ink & you lighten them, then they end up like this:

This looks like a fuzzy picture, but really it's a photo of the printed out lightened version I made.

How to lighten an image for white embossing:

1) Save picture as a jpeg or other suitable file.
2) Open in imaging software. (I love Microsoft Picture Manager.)
3) Rotate, crop & lighten it & print. (I chose the 4 pictures to one page setting to get this size for a 4 2/8" card) This is printed on Naturals White cardstock.

Then you can just go over it with a glue pen and emboss it. Here's a glue-pen embossing tutorial. After I embossed the textile pattern, I just used a little River Rock ink on an aquapainter to paint the darker areas for interest.

Distressed heat embossing technique:

To make this texture on the card, I just used a distressed embossing technique.This is White Craft ink with Clear embossing powder on plain River Rock cardstock. I used Paisley Print (a retired Stampin Up! background.)

To get the deeper tones of the hue around the embossing all you have to do is over heat it. (Blasphemous--I know--of course, we normally avoid overheating embossing powder...) However, you can get some really interesting effects by heating a lot. Super-heating silver e.p. for instance allows you take the shine off and get a distressed pewter look. Lots of fun!

Happy Craftin' :0)


P.S. The little paper flower is a prima from Close to my Heart.

P.P.S. If you'd like me to email you the lightened pattern, just let me know: mmmccart@sfu.ca