Distress Oxide Play!

My complete set of Distress Oxide ink pads arrived on Saturday, so I spent some time yesterday playing with a few to see how they work.  I had already watched lots of YouTube videos about them, but there's nothing like experimenting yourself.  For today, I'll just show you how they react; tomorrow, I'll share how I carried on and the card that I made with the finished tag.  This is as far as I progressed using the Distress Oxides.  I chose three colours that I know go well together; Cracked Pistachio, Broken China and Faded Jeans and worked on several #8 manilla tags to try out different effects.
 








Firstly, I added some colour from each pad onto my glass mat, spritzed with water and dragged a tag through the ink.  I dried the tag, then repeated the process, adding extra spray to the tag and tipping it to encourage the ink to move.  I did this for a third time and this was the result. 
 



















Next I tried blending the ink directly onto the tag with a small blending tool, then spritzing with water.  The different inks blend amazingly well, just as I had seen on other blogs.  Before the ink dried, I added some water and once again, tipped the tag to encourage the inks to run, then dried everything with a heat gun.  This produced a more vibrant, deeper colour, although there were nowhere near as many drips and dribbles of ink.  It was the second tag that I chose to work with.  I chose three of the stamps from the Journalling set by Claritystamp and stamped them over the dry background with Vintage Photo Distress Oxide.  The Distress Oxide inks stamp far more crisply than normal Distress inks, although the top photo was taken after I had spritzed the stamped images with a fine mist of water, which caused the images to soften a little.  I haven't tried working on dark card yet, although I have seen from other people's examples how vibrant the colours remain, even on a dark surface.