My Love,My Heart, My Art: Distress Paint enamelware emboss technique.

What do you get when you mix a Tim Holtz technique with a Tammy Tutterow technique? You get a super fast, super EASY way to create a really cool way to make your metal look like it has been dug out of a treasure chest found 20 leagues under the sea! For this technique you will require Tim Holtz distress paints for a patina look, A metallic distress paint (also from Tim Holtz and Ranger), tweezers or some way to hold your hot piece while you take a clean dry cloth and wipe, I always work on a craft mat and Ranger's enamelware embossing powder and a heat tool. I want you to take a few minutes and see how fast this is! First we are going to start with Tim's technique of adding Distress paints and metallic distress paint to our piece. One take a piece of metal

Apply your Distress paints

I used Broken china and then I put a dab of frayed burlap on my non stick craft sheet and dabbed and mixed it onto the ornate plate.

now you do as Tim does in his tutorials and partially dry your piece and then wipe down with a dry clean cloth (BE CAREFUL YOUR METAL WILL BE HOT FROM HEATING! I used my tweezers to hold the piece and then wiped a cloth over the piece. You can repeat this step until you have something you are satisfied with. Next take your metallic distress paint (I'm using antiqued bronze)

and you will repeat the steps above- applying your paint, partially drying and then wiping your piece (again...mind be careful of hot metal!)

now we are going to work on the part of the tutorial that I got from Tammy Tutterow and we are going to take some of the ranger enamelware embossing powder and add it to our piece. You can either add it while your piece is hot and sprinkle a little bit over your piece

and you will get something like this

Which will give you a piece that looks like the start of the salt water decaying it or perhaps barnicles starting on the piece...OR you can take your Distress Emboss pad and apply it to the plate and then dump your enamelware onto the plate and emboss the whole piece and you will get this

Now tell me that isn't cool!! I loved using the distress embossing powders and doing it that way but this is super fast! AND of course you are not limited to patina if you don't want... you can also use brighter paints and the enamelware and get something like this (I used victorian velvet distress paint for the flower)

You can also do the same technique on plastic (be careful not to overheat one spot [like I did!] keep your heat gun moving around. And you will get this..

(sorry for the lighting on that one it was EARLY morning when I took that picture) Now to pull it all together I inked a tag in shades of blue and then stamped with Tim Holtz Stampers Anonymous Wallpaper and wood stamp distressed and inked the edges (in chipped sapphire) and then added the metal pieces, a mini blueprints 2 butterfly (Tim Holtz/Stampers Anonymous) that was colored with Tim/Ranger distress markers a touch of Rangers stickles added, a small trail of pearl flourish (cut from a larger MME flourish)- and then you have...