Working with Blending Chalks

I love the effect you can get from using blending chalks like these. They are great for a shadowy or highling effect for your stamped images and can give any image some depth. These chalks are made by Inkadinkado and come in soft tones and sparkly chalks. What is really cool is they are non toxic and acid free.

Here is a really cool effect that you can do with these chalks.

Use your Versa Mark embossing stamp pad to ink up your stamp and stamp your image onto a card.

Take a cotton ball and rub it into the color chalk of your choice. Here I am using a turquoise color.

Now rub the cotton ball with the chalk on it over the image you just stamped with the Versa Mark embossing ink. The image will look a darker turquoise as if you had stamped it in turquoise ink and you will have a lighter turquoise effect to your background.

I will do this same technique on a darker card and use a white chalk to rub over the image that is stamped using the Versa Mark embossing ink.

The image will look dark and the white chalk gives it a highlighted background.

You can also use those little sponge tipped thingies that you use to apply eye shadow with to apply chalk just where you want it. I wouldn't recommend buying the sponge tip thingies at the craft store. They are so much cheaper if you get them at your local retail store in the make up aisle.

Here I have created a highlighted background by working from the area closest to the stamped image and pulling the color away. It looks really cool if you do this technique with a sunset. Use the sponge tip thingy to pull the color away from the sun to give it the effect that it is darker towards the surface of the sun and the color gets lighter farther away. Try this using two colors of chalk on your sponge thingy and applying it to the surface of your card. You can experiment using the chalks with stencils and torn pieces of paper by laying them on a card and pulling the chalk from the edge of the paper or stencil onto the card. It would work well for clouds or outlines of mountains, etc.

These glimmer or sparkly chalks are really cool if you want to add a bit of sparkle or shimmer to your cards.

Here I used a light pink glimmer chalk for the fairy wings and around the image to give the whole card some sparkle.

For this card I tore the paper and used brown chalk on the torn edge to give the paper a distressed old look.

This card was made using the embossing ink pad and three different shades of chalk. I used a dark pink and a dark blue for the heart and black chalk around the edges of the card for a shadowy effect.

With this card I stamped the image on vellum and placed the vellum over a charcoal colored card using the spray adhesive to make the vellum stick without having to use embellishments that would take away from the image. To give the image a shadowy look, I used black chalk and a sponge thingy and rubbed the chalk around the image. I also used yellow chalk on a sponge tip thingy to give the lantern a glow.

There are so many possibilities for using the blending chalks to give your images that extra little effect. Experiment with them and see what you can come up with!