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Brayering
You can use the brayer as a "reverse image" stamp. I needed a small cottage facing left, but only had one that faced right. Ink up the stamp and carefully roll the brayer over it ( or better yet move the stamp against the brayer). Breathe on the image on the brayer and roll it into place.
The lines that you get when you are brayering-are they vertical (north-south) or horizontal (east-west)? If they are vertical, it is probably at the spot where the brayer has made its first complete revolution. There will be a noticeably light spot there. Be sure to pick your brayer up off the paper and keep rolling in just one direction. Then ink it up again and repeat. Maybe do it one more time.
For beautiful wrapping paper : use a rainbow pad and mulberry paper (plain or with metallic flakes). Place the mulberry paper on top of a larger piece of scratch paper. Ink up the brayer carefully so that you don't muddy the rainbow pad too much. Roll across the short length of the paper. Roll a little past the edge of the mulberry paper onto the scratch paper. Then ink up again, turn the brayer around so that the two colors that make the seam are the same. Remember since you're flipping the brayer over each time, put it back on the pad the right way. Repeat. It looks gorgeous. Gold embossing looks really nice.
You bray rainbows with your rainbow pad. You stamp images all over the brayer and roll it over your cardstock for a neat background. You color squiggles and dots and lines on it and bray. You color just lines and roll them across your card stock, then clean it off, color different colored lines and bray it in the opposite direction of your cardstock (plaid look) You bray over an inkpad and get your brayer nice and coated, then you lightly mist your cardstock and bray over that, or you mist your dye ink coated brayer and bray your cardstock, you stamp your images in clear embossing fluid onto your plain cardstock and then bray over it with dye ink, the images will pop up and look ghostly, you put some pigment ink refill ink onto a big piece of acrylic (or glass or something very flat and nonabsorbent) and then bray over it to get a very even coat on the brayer, and then bray over your detailed large stamp (like Magentas) to get a beautiful finish.
So she sent the brayer and I ink it up and then ink the stamp up and easy! I can now use those gigantic stamps! Plus the color is much more even than when I was trying to ink that big stamp! I also use mine to smooth out the glue or paste when I am layering.
A. Roll your brayer over dye ink rainbow pads, then roll the brayer on to glossy card stock.
B. Squeeze some liquid appliqué or puffy fabric paint on to a piece of foil. Load your brayer with it, then roll onto cardstock. Wash your brayer immediately, then heat the cardstock. This gives your cardstock that leather feel.
C. Using markers or a dye pad, ink up a stamp such as a tree. Lay it on a flat surface, inky side up. Run your brayer over the stamp, then brayer onto a piece of cardstock. Do this several times for a forest look.
D. Use markers directly on your brayer to create interesting patterns for backgrounds.
Resist Brayering
Resist is one of my favorite techniques! If you have access to a Nov/Dec `95 RSM, Lea Everse has a great article about it in there. In that article, she notes that you need a coated paper...otherwise, the embossing ink will just soak into the paper, and you won't be able to do a resist. I have never tried it with pigment inks, but I have had great success with mattekote and dye ink. One trick I learned is to have a semi-damp paper towel nearby...not only to "dull" the edges, but also to clean your brayer between passes. Here are the steps I use:
1) Stamp your resist image in embossing ink on mattekote or kromecote.
2) Ink up your brayer, then run just_ the edges on a damp paper towel - this will keep down those harsh lines.
3) Brayer across the cardstock.
4) Clean your brayer
5) Repeat steps 2, 3, and 4 about six or seven times - you will begin to see the images "pop out" at you.
6) Keeping in mind that the colors will dry a bit lighter than what you see, decide when you want to stop...I usually don't go beyond 9-10 passes, since the embossing ink starts to get picked up on the brayer, and the resist becomes less and less successful.
7) On the last pass, I do _not_ clean my brayer, but use the ink to even any leftover edges/uneven lines
8) Let it dry overnight and/or seal with Krylon Crystal Clear (or other sealant)
I tape my cheesecloth down to a piece of cardboard to which I have taped unexposed photography paper (just because it's slick and won't absorb the color). Then after I've brayered the glossy cardstock one way, I turn it 90 degrees and continue brayering in the original direction. I continue turning until I like the look. Each time the card is turned you place it in a different position and the brayering covers the white spots. After I am finished brayering I take the card outside and spray it with Krylon Crystal Clear and sprinkle glitter on it. I then use the card to punch out different shapes - teddy bears, trees, butterflies, anything you want. It will also depend on the colors you brayered with.
One really cool brayering trick I've learned is brayering over cheesecloth. First pull out random strings so that there are lots of "holes" in the cheese cloth. Lay it over your glossy (actually, I prefer matte) cardstock and brayer away. At first it will just seem as though the cloth is getting all the color - keep brayering. When you lift up the cheesecloth you will have a beautiful and I do mean stunning design. I do this with my StampFrancisco rainbows and they work GREAT(which is good because those pads are lousy for just stamping; not enough color). Two color combos I really like are shades of yellow/orange/red and shades of blue/purple/gray. Keep the cloth, it gets better with age :) Brayer up a whole sheet of cardstock and then cut it down to card size.
Oh another hint - when you roll the brayer on the inkpad, DON:T roll back and forth. Start at one end of the pad, roll to the other end. Stop, lift the brayer and return to the beginning of the pad and do it again. Otherwise you will ink up only half your roller. If you don't see what I am saying here, try it and then you will understand.
I love brayering on shiny cardstock with a bright rainbow pad. Don't have the color cardstock you'd like for a certain card? Brayer it with that color. Draw on the brayer with Marvy's or Tom Bows use different colors making lines, dots, wavy lines etc. make an interesting background. Using a bold stamp, stamp on a white card ep with white then brayer overtop. One of my favorites is fall leaves, brayering with a Harvest Rainbow Pad. Make a mask brayering over it. Use this for borders, or cut outs. Brayer card with orange, make pumpkin cut outs for mask, brayer over the pumpkin masks with a deeper orange, or yellow or another color, then remove the masks
1. Dark colors and bright colors on glossy cardstock. I can now have any color of glossy cardstock I want! dye inks only
2. Using Kaleidacolor pads for multi-colored glossy cardstock. In fact I hardly ever do any matt finish cards for these.
3. Using fat Marvy markers to color in sections on the brayer to make striped and plaid effect cards.
4. I also have a 4" brayer with a detachable roller. I put a number of rubber bands on it, inked it up on a Kal. pad and got the greatest lines in all colors wiggling all over the page.
5. After coloring the glossy card in small patches of color with markers, I stamp over it with white pigment or mbossing ink and emboss in clear powder. Heat and emboss. Then go over the whole card with a brayer and a dark or black ink. Wipe the ink off the embossed parts and the brilliant colors show thru the embossing.
6. After getting an even coat of a brilliant or other intense solid color onto the glossy card with a brayer, I use a coarse brush and splatter and brush on clear embossing ink. Then I use Peacock or Holographic ep on it. Heating it brings out a beautiful play of colors. I have some over fuchsia and another over royal blue that look like fireworks were set off on the surface and froze into place.
And for an interesting effect I sometime do "resists" with the brayer. I stamp a repeating pattern or something like a large feather on glossy cardstock, using a wet, gooey ColorBox (I use colours that I don't like, and therefore don't use too much). Then I ink up the brayer with nice wet dye ink from a rainbow pad, and brayer the card using a little more strength/energy than I normally apply to brayering.
the neatest thing I've ever seen with a brayer (and the reason I must need one eventually) was a card in RSM, jan-feb I think.. the artist had taken a stamp of a single horse and inked it and used that to ink the brayer, and run a whole herd of horses heading right across all of the card in a variety of colors that played well together, for the background.. then stamped the horse in black once on the card (which resulted in it going the opposite direction as the herd of `em).. really cool..
This is one of my favorite kinds of brayering, and the actual brayering process becomes the background. Very colorful and very nice. This is also an excellent way to create a background for another finished card to top this. Using those "artsy" or Celtic or "design" (not sure what it is but I like it) stamps are really great with this. (non glossy paper used only). dye based inks used for the brayering, only, don't use pigment ink for brayering this. Using solid stamps give the best results.
Take the small size brayer, get your solid 2 color combo ink pads out, lay out some paper on have some 8 ½ X 11 (any paper, any color will do) paper cut up into 4 equal pieces. (pc size). Lay them out on your newspaper and start brayering! some of my favorite color combos are: navy/burgundy; navy/red; purple burgundy; purple/pink; purple/red, I haven't really tried any other colors, though. lying silver pigment ink (none of the other pigment ink colors have worked, I've tried them all!), stamp them out on your paper randomly, not a lot of stamps, easy does it so you'll have room for the brayered colors. You take your darker color first, and brayer it across the entire page, one or two different strokes, but going back and forth to get a string vibrant color if you want. Then do the same thing with the lighter color, washing the brayer completely, and drying it, first. Leave some spots untouched by the brayering if you want, this especially looks good if you've used a coordinating colored paper that goes with the inks you've chosen. Let this dry for at least an hour. Using a silver inking pen, draw a straight line around the border of this for a really classy looking card.
Another great brayering technique is to take glossy paper, using dye based ink ONLY, and a multi colored ink pad, brayer over the paper several times, making sure not to mix the color scheme of the multi pad. This makes a fantastic border and you can use this for regular cards, OR for a fast and easy pc. These are some of the great things I love to do with this, especially for birthday cards. Using embossing gold ep/pigment ink, emboss your favorite "corner" stamp in two corners of the card, opposite and kitty corner from each other. Then in the middle use any kind of happy birthday, or congratulations or friendship or whatever you want in the center of the card, embossing this in gold, too, or just using black or some other complimentary color looks great, also.
I just took a class on brayering and I want to pass along a few tips I received there that may help some of you with questions you have about brayers. Avoiding white lines, or ink lines: When you brayer you roll the brayer down the card, then lift the brayer, put it back down on the card and roll up the card, then lift the brayer. The secret of escaping those lines is lifting the brayer each pass you make over the card.
I saw it demoed to use for a watercolor brayer effect-ink it up with multicolor pad or markers and mist it and them brayer-very nice watercolor look!! I bought one!!!
Try rolling your brayer and really inking it on a rainbow pad, either pigment or dye.. I've used both.
You can then roll the brayer over your paper in various ways to get various effects. Just play with it. Keep your practice sheets, though, since they can end up as great background papers with thin-medium borders....
I saw that on her website. I want one but only because I'm on an acrylic kick right now-I don't know why but I love the stuff. Anyway wouldn't it work like the hard rubber brayer? Someone posted that they didn't like the hard rubber because it would slip `n slide. Hope this helps some.
No it doesn't work the same at all - I just took three classes from Suze this weekend, at Orlando and the only use for the acrylic one that she has found is for backgrounds - and it does NOT go on smoothly - it skips - its an interesting effect if you like it; but is nowhere near as useful as a rubber or even sponge brayer.
I thought I share a Brayer tip with you...I use my brayer for folding my cardstock and even the text paper... I have a brayer that I only use for this... It gives a clean fold and also takes care of the creases...It is especially convenient when embossing since you don't have to touch your paper so much when folding, preventing the Embossing Powder to stick everywhere....
A brayer is a wonderful tool. In fact, I haven't found any other way to use the finely detailed Magenta stamps than with a brayer on glossy card stock. The shape is reminiscent of a paint roller (for rolling paint on your walls?), except that the handle is only about 4" long and the roller part is only about 6" long. The roller is made of soft rubber (there's also a sponge type for a "mottled" effect and a hard rubber type). Depending on the look you want you can use glossy paper for a very evenly covered, bright colored look (in fact, I use this rather than using colored glossy paper. I just make my own colors) or you can use it on matte paper incorporating the texture of the paper (if any) into the final look of the card. You can use this tool in many, many ways:
1. Run it through your solid color dye ink pad (being careful to cover it with ink on all sides and end to end, otherwise you will get white lines in your work where this is no ink). Then run your brayer all over your card stock in all directions. Try not to run off the edges of the card stock too much because you create a line in the ink with the edge of the card and then that line appears on the card stock in the next pass.
2. Run it through a Kaleidacolor ink pad (always going in the same direction and as close to the same place on the card as possible so as not to mix the ink colors on your ink pad). Then you can do several different things on the card. You can either run your brayer in only one direction for a striped look or you can run in one direction and then again at 90 degrees. Some people do this to make a plaid or madras look. You can also just run your brayer through your Kaleidacolor pad and then in various directions all over the card stock. I have a friend who couldn't believe how fast she could turn out beautiful cards by just running an inked brayer in various directions over the card. She burned through the card stock that day! This technique is the basis of Joseph's coat (it's the color of ink you see through the stamped image).
3. Ink up the brayer with a solid color of dye ink and then use the brayer to ink your stamp. Then stamp as normal. This is how you ink up a Magenta stamp as well as other finely detailed stamps.
4. Ink up a brayer with a Kaleidacolor pad (remembering to only ink in one direction in order to keep the colors in your ink pad pure) and then run the brayer over the stamp in various directions. This gives a beautiful variegated effect to the card. A caveat here is to be sure you don't make too many passes over the stamp because then the colors will come out "muddy" or even black when you stamp the image. While Kaleidacolor color combinations are beautiful, I've started making some combos for myself starting with an uninked Kaleidacolor pad. I'm going to make a Christmas colored one today (red, green, royal blue . . . )
5. Ink up a stamp in dye or pigment ink (depending on if you're using glossy or matte paper) and then stamp the brayer. Then run the brayer over the card stock. This gives some of those beautiful washed looking backgrounds that you see. You can either do it over and over again (even using different colors or different shades of ink) or you can just do it once or twice for a less busy look. Be sure to test this on a scratch piece of paper first so that you see how dark the ink is. You might not want that first, very inky, dark impression on the card if you're going for a light, washed background.
Here's something I discovered by accident a day or so ago while playing with my new brayer. I had run it across a Kaleidacolor pad and, wanting a paler look, was running off some of the excess color onto scrap paper which was on top of some newspaper. Well, my son's rubber toy snake was underneath the newspaper and its impression showed through as sort of a gentle squiggle. So I moved the snake around and kept brayering until there were multiple darker squiggles in a field of varying color. Then I tried putting lightweight paper over a solid stamp (ginko leaves) and made really pretty rainbowed background paper with random leaf impressions over which I then stamped the ginko leaves in a vase. I'm a newbie and was very excited to have "discovered" a technique, especially since I was making a card for an old friend--a gifted artist--who needed some cheer
The key to quick and seamless brayered backgrounds is a juicy pad (I LOVE using the Adirondack pads!!!!!), the right card stock and complete inking of the brayer. It's easier to learn this with a solid pad (rather than a rainbow pad).
This is one of my favorite techniques; yep, you just stamp with the clear embossing ink, then brayer with dye ink. No EP, no heat tools. Word to the wise though, if you want the dye ink to retain its color instead of fading, use some sort of spray sealer on it. Sometimes I like the fade; my crimson pad turns a lovely hot pink, sage green a muted green, etc.
If you just use the pigment ink and no ep to stamp your design, it will change the dye ink texture over that spot only, so you get a lighter, ghost image where you stamped with pigment ink.
I attended a class in Ghosting. You stamp glossy paper with the clear embossing pad and heat it with the heat gun (do not sprinkle it with ep), then roll your brayer in ink...do not use the pigment pads as they will not on glossy paper, we use the
cover your stamped paper with the brayer and immediately wipe down with a paper towel. TADA..it is finished... great effect
You get different effect depending on which one you use. The foam give a very soft color - almost pastel even when using bright colors. After applying ink to the lucite roller you spritz it a little with water to give it some "hook" (otherwise it just slides) and roll it on your paper and it gives you a watery look.
Subject: Brayering with torn paper masks
You can get really nice and interesting background effects in this way. I especially like to use my rainbow pads for this. Tear pieces of paper in any shape you like. Be sure that the piece is big enough to slip a cs under it and still has some part on the top and the bottom (or on the sides) that is overhanging the cardstock. You use these overhanging parts to tape on a scrap paper. No, you can slip the cs under. Ink your brayer. Roll it over the card. You can brayer in different colors, directions, patterns, etc. When you are satisfied with the result, pull out the cs: you'll have white (or blank) areas where the masks were. The torn edge that makes this design really nice. Try to tear stripes, different geometric shapes (circles, squares, diamonds, etc), just a big piece of mask in the center. Slip the cs under the masks in an angle if you like. The possibilities are endless: brush some glitter glue on your masked cs, or brush embossing fluid and heat emboss. (There are temporary adhesives in the market; I haven't tried to use them in this way, but they can be a way too to keep the masks in place.) Play and have fun! You can use sponges, (pretty dense) background stamps with the same idea.
I use the Kaleidacolor pads with the gaps open and move the brayer left to right while inking it. I also move it left to right when applying it to the paper-this seems to blend the colors. Then I reink many, many, many times before I am happy with the colors. I let it dry overnight before doing any stamping on it.