Backporch: Technique of the Week: Bleach Painting

Friday, June 5, 2015

Technique of the Week: Bleach Painting

In conjunction with the Art 'n Soul newsletter article, "Technique of the Week" I wanted to post something about the technique of bleach painting, along with cards that I made using it.

At the "Color Me Darkly" class by Helene of Magenta Stamps, we painted with bleach, and got some amazingly beautiful results! I have stamped with bleach before, but never painted, and I realized that I love this technique!

Using black paper (regular black cardstock, not coated), we first stamped our images with black Versafine ink. Probably any black pigment ink would work.

You can emboss your image with clear embossing powder, but you do not have to emboss. The bleach will affect the black ink, but it will not take it out entirely. The bleach does not affect the embossing.

Pour a little bleach into a small dish. Cheap bleach seems to work best. You can then dip your paintbrush into the bleach and paint with it.

Depending on the paper that you have, you will get different effects. Usually, the bleach will turn the black paper brown (or tan, or a combination). The eliptical area around the sentiment on the card above was painted with bleach, and left alone. You can leave it brown like that, and this is a very cool look, or you can use colored pencils or watercolor in the bleached areas.

I stamped the images with Black Onyx Versafine ink, and embossed with clear embossing powder. I painted bleach onto the open areas of the flowers, and then painted an elipse around the sentiment so it would stand out. I used Vintage Artquest Palette to paint onto the flower petals (using a minimal amont of water), and flicked blue from the Stargazer Artquest Palette over the piece.

Be sure to wash your brush with clean water after using the bleach.

On the card above, I again stamped with Black Onyx Versafine ink, and embossed with clear embossing powder. I bleached the insides of the blossoms, and painted them with gold and red watercolors from the Artquest Vintage Palette. These flowers have a beautiful shine to the petals in real life that was hard to photograph.

It was fun to experiment with bleaching different areas of an image, and to experiment with different mediums to color the bleached areas. On this card I bleached the open areas of the images and used Prismacolor pencils to add color back in. I stamped the sentiment in Versamark Ink and embossed it with White Diamond embossing powder.

Cards on these more muted papers can be perfect for a guy, or really for almost anyone. I think they have a real richness to them.

This is one last card that I really liked, and I find it the most interesting, because I stamped the Apple Blossom image from Magenta, in Black Onyx Versamark ink, and did not emboss it. I brushed bleach over the entire piece, and you can see that the stamped image still shows up.

I then used Prismacolor pencils to color just one of the flower images. To finish off the card, I stamped the image in Versamark on a piece of orange card stock, and embossed it with clear embossing powder, I added the sentiment in Versamark as well, and embossed it in Ranger Black Sparkle embossing powder. The sparkle in the sentiment made photography difficult, but it does show up very well in real life.

Note: Pam Nelson tried this technique on other dark paper (dark blue) and it worked well. She also tried it on dark Stardream paper, and it worked less well, but still gave an interesting effect. Try your own experiments, it's really fun!

Materials Used:

Serenity Card

Magenta Stamps: