Faux Metal Tutorial

Hey Y'all!!! It is Alaine, aka Ms. January, here again with a little tutorial I have put together on making paper look like aged metal.

Steampunk is all the rage right now. A few days ago I had to make a card for my Sister In Law who loves everything Steampunk, and I didn't have a background base that I really liked. I had purchased the new Cuttlebug Gears Embossing Folder which is really cool, but it still looked so plain after I had embossed it. So I started experimenting.

What do you need -
Medium tone textured brown paper (or hey - - maybe grey would work too)
Embossing Folder
Glimmer Mist, Spritzers or something else similar
Copper or Silver or Gold Pigment Ink Pad
Rag - I  used a dried baby wipe I had laying around (and I mean one used on stamps for cleaning and left out to dry - - not used on any actual babies)
Clear EP

The first step is to randomly spritz the brown paper with the glimmer mist or shiny stuff. Not only does this add a background of sparkle, it also makes the dry embossing of the paper take better. On the sample below I used Glimmer Mist Rose and Key Lime on the left using the gears embossing folder and plum and silver on the left with the metal plating embossing folder. You want these to be uneven applications to give it interest.

Once you have spritzed run it through the embossing folder then dry it (the paper will still be moist from the spritzing). After that is done - - take the rag and dab it onto the metallic colored ink pad and then swipe it over the paper. I rubbed in different directions, and some places heavier. This is shown below:

On both samples, I used three different colors of ink to show you how they will come out different on the two different samples. The top in both cases is Brilliance Cosmic Copper, followed by Versacolor Gold in the center, and then VersaColor Silver at the bottom. Notice how on the paper spritzed with purple, the top has a more rosy tone to it? By wiping the ink on with a rag, it leaves the darker areas below. And some of those will be different colors because of the spritzing with the Glimmer Mist.

Once this is done, then you sprinkle the clear embossing powder all over the paper and heat emboss. If it isn't shiny enough for you, sprinkle, and heat emboss again. This ends up looking like this:

 

To me it is amazing that you can make the plain brown paper look like the different types of metals. Mix it up, Match it up... smudge silver with copper with gold ink and make a mess. It comes out really shiny and cool. I used a piece of the paper I metalized  using the cosmic copper ink with the Man's Ruin skull holding a rose on this bookmark I made.

 I hope you enjoyed this little tutorial. Have a great day, and come back and visit us again really soon.

~~ Ms. January 2011 ~~  Alaine