Distress Ink Night Time Background

Hi everyone! Today, I wanted to share with you this card using Sweet Stamp Shop’s Motorhome. After making a ton of cards all last year, I’ve realized that whenever I need a quick background, or a splash of color, I turn to my distress inks. I love distress inks because they come in the mini ink cubes, so I can have a huge variety of colors without taking up too much space, and the price point is great!

There are a ton of techniques that come alongside using distress inks, but today I wanted to share my go-to process of creating a nighttime sky. With this particular stamp set, the nighttime sky matches an RV camping scene.

I use Bristol Smooth cardstock almost 90% of the time, when I want to create a distress ink background. The paper is a smooth texture that makes blending distress inks really easy and it really does make a difference. Luckily, today’s technique to create a night time sky, doesn’t require much time or precision at all!

First, I pick colors I want to use (yes, I said colors!) and I like the bright ones (pickled raspberry, mowed lawn, wilted violet, fossilized amber). I just add colors in different areas of the paper and it looks like a big unblended mess, but that’s ok! It’s perfect the way it is. I’ve learned that with distress inks, it always looks a mess until you are done.

Second, I pull out my Chipped Sapphire and Black Soot distress inks. This is where the night time effect comes in. I’ll go over the colors lightly with Chipped Sapphire: enough where I can still see the colors, but dark enough where the blue covers up and dulls the brightness of the inks. ’ll take Black Soot and blend the color on the edges of my paper.

Lastly, a night time sky isn’t complete until there’s some stars shining bright. For this, I use Copic’s Opaque White Ink. I just put a little bit on an acrylic block, and use a small water brush to flick on “stars”. It really completes the night sky background and it’s perfect to use!

I stamped out a small scene with most of the images from this stamp set to make it look like an RV going down the road to its campsite. This scene works perfectly with the starry night time background. I loved how this card ended up and this background goes so well with it!