More PAPER tools – and something else!

22/02/2013 by UKMA 23 Comments

Right, so to carry on, I was looking at the Catalyst tools and thinking they looked cool, but impatient to play and too lazy (and cheap) to order some.  I had such success yesterday with paper and cardboard, so I saw no reason not to try similar.  Worked a treat. First I cut some cereal-box weight card with some decorative scissors.  I cut both edges so I ended up with a dual-sided tool.

Simple as dragging that across the plate – light pressure, and I wipe off the edge on my brayer-cleaning paper to remove most of the paint. You can see the different effect of the scallop v the pinking shears.

Next, I tried the CLOUDS and the STAMP edge.

Clouds give a very wide band, and collects a lot of paint.

Love the fine wavy lines made by wiggling the stamp edge back and forth!

One thing I like about this method is you can make the “tool” to fit whatever plate you have – as long as you have a big enough piece of cardboard! And you can get slightly different looks by varying the pressure and the angle.

So that got me thinking – I spied the spare blocks and thought….I wonder? Yep. I cut a couple more paper strips with the scissors …

..and wrapped them around the block, with the decorative edge sticking up.

Mixed success.  The paper is very thin, so the paint it lifts off is minimal. See? And the paper doesn’t have much strength, so you have to be a bit careful – so getting the right pressure (light enough not to collapse the edge, firm enough to remove enough paint to make it interesting) is tricky. I wonder if a double thickness would work?

So THAT got me thinking…Fun Foam!  Oh yeah! So I cut and stuck THAT around a block, and:

And of course I had to wrap some around a bit of old wrapping paper tube for a round version!

The two sides are the positive and the negative cuts from the scallop.  I do have a stamp-edge and cloud-edge as well.  They all give different spacing to the marks.

And you can make something a bit more like the Catalyst tools by using fun foam – just stick the foam to cardboard, then stick another piece over the top to make a bit of a sandwich, like so:

Trim the edges and wipe to remove the paint. Wiggle or not.  The foam is much softer than the card, but both work pretty well.

So that let me play with all the techniques I’ve seen, and while my results may not be exactly the same as the commercial tools, mine were all free and immediately available.  I can carry on using them, decide which things I really like using, and if need be, buy the real ones.  Happy FRIDAY!