Technique-N-Tool Tuesday: Using Your Rubber Brayer

There are several techniques you can do with our Close To My Heart Rubber Brayer.  In today's tutorial, I will only cover just 2 of them... Faux Tearing and Rubber Band Backgrounds!

Supplies Required:

• Rubber Brayer - This Speedball brayer made by CTMH is especially handy because you can remove the rubber brayer from the handle making clean up easy and other fun techniques possible.
• Light colored Cardstock
• Ink Pads - choose any color!  Depending on the look you want, you can use complementary colors, or colors in the same shades.
• Printer paper & Dotto Dots respositionable adhesive - for Faux tearing
• Rubber bands - for Rubber Band Backgrounds (mix the shapes and sizes, too!)

Faux Tearing Technique:

Step 1 - Take a piece of thin piece of paper like printer paper and make a tear down the middle (horizontally or vertically will depend on your project size).

Step 2 - Adhere a few small bits of Dotto Dots onto the back of the printer paper to help keep the paper from moving on you.  Then place down as desired onto your cardstock project.

Step 3 - Ink your rubber brayer completely!  This will mean you need to lift up and smoothly roll the brayer several times over the ink pad in a forward motion.  If you just roll it back and forth on the ink pad, your brayer may not completely capture ink all the way around the barrell giving you more distinct lines on your project.

Step 4 - Roll the brayer over your cardstock and printer paper tear.  The more ink you apply, the deeper the color.  You may notice some 1st versus 2nd generation lines show up where you run out of ink if you have a larger piece of cardstock.  Just keep applying ink until you get a nice color and wait 5 - 10 minutes.  The ink will soak into your cardstock and the lines will blend in nicely with the back ground you've just created!

Step 5 - Remove the piece of printer paper to expose your faux tear!  Optional:  Keep the printer paper down and sponge a darker or color along the edge of the faux tear and edges of your project to create a softer, dimensional look to your inked area.

Step 6 - The nice thing about Faux Tearing is you can stamp over the brayered area to create beautiful scenes like my Tree card.  View the tree card here.

Rubber Band Backgrounds Technique:

Step 1:  Remove brayer from handle and attach rubber bands - in different sizes and numbers as desired.  Then re-attach the brayer to the handle.

Step 2:  Ink your brayer like step 3 above.

Step 3:  Roll your brayer over your project!  This technique must be done on smaller sized cardstock areas so you capture one rotation of the brayer, but you can have fun with mixing complementary colors and creating stripes, checkers, and even a crazy backgrounds brayering in all directions!

OPTION - Cover your brayer in Saran Wrap for another fun background look!