Making Brushos Backgrounds for Cards

This post is based on making Brushos backrounds for cards. Brushos are watercolour ink crystals that react amazingly with water. They come in a wide range of colours and many of the colours further separate out into various different hues so there is a huge potential for colour combinations and effects.

It has been a while since I’ve blogged about the regular get-togethers my friend Steph and I have to try out different card making techniques and to use some of the new ‘toys’ we have bought at the annual SENZ show. We usually make backgrounds using our selected technique and then our challenge is to make them into cards – and we are often amazed at how different the resulting cards are even if the backgrounds are almost the same.

: Brushos watercolour crystals

: Colours react with water

We used watercolour paper, spritzing it with a mister bottle of water before shaking the Brushos out of the pinhole in the container. You only need a tiny amount of the Brushos powder as it spreads incredibly. You can vary the amount of water you put on the paper to start with to get different effects and you can spray more water on the paper to move the ink around and blend it together.

We were happy to just experiment with different colour combinations and intensities this time, but I’ve since watched various YouTube videos where they use Brushos in a whole lot of different ways, from putting the powder along the edge of dry paper and then spraying water across to get directional patterns, to putting objects on the paper before spritzing it with water so that the colour doesn’t travel there, to using a stencil or stamp to create an embossed resist image that doesn’t take up the colour. I’m quite excited by the possibilities.

Between Steph and I we have made up most of our backgrounds into cards which I share below. Some of the backgrounds easily suggest what should go on them e.g. the sea themed ones, but others were much harder to use. In some I have coloured part of the stamped image to make it ‘pop’ from the background or applied some crystal glaze or glitter paste. In one I applied glitter paste through a stencil to give a subtle butterfly design (that is more obvious in reality than in the photo). For others that are too hard to use as a background, you can cut them down and just use a portion of the design, place them behind a cutout image or cut around a stamped design to form a shape e.g. a leaf in autumn colours.