Faux Tea-dyed flowers

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People occasionally ask me how to search through my blog. To search by topic, just type a word in the search bar up at the top of this blog. This will limit your search to only things on my blog.

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Faux Tea-dyed flowers
I made my own Christmas cards this year, and since I had to make so many, I kept the design VERY simple. It takes too long to color a cute little image on that many cards, so instead I used some hand-dyed paper flowers. You can use this same effect on wide ribbon to make it look tea-dyed as well.

These flowers are very easy to make with Copic markers, and look really cool when you are done. Before you start, be sure to have plenty of clean scratch paper under your work, as this gets messy.

First, take your paper flower and scribble on it with a middle/dark color. For this flower, I used R59. The final color will be both lighter and darker than this color, so test a few colors to find the one that will end up matching your project the best.


Next, you need to add a lot of colorless blender. I like using an empty water-brush that has been filled with colorless blender. If you don't have a water-brush, then you can accomplish the same thing by dipping your colorless blender straight into the big refill bottle, then dripping the blender on. This will make the flower very wet and make the inks flow around similarly to if you were actually dying the flower.


Wherever you drip the blender, the color on the flower will start to bleed away from that area.

If you drip in the middle first then the color will run out to the petals more. If you drip a small drop onto each petal then it will push the color out to the edges of each petal. The second flower was soaked evenly all over, see how the colors muted more and ran together more? If you like this look then go for it.

Once you get the look you want, let the flower dry completely before touching it. If you have a drop of ink on your finger and touch the wet flower, then it will pick up that color. If there is color on the scratch paper under the flower it could pick up that ink as well.

Here are some variations on the effect. The small pink/purple flower has a nice 2 tone feel, with purple added to the edges only, pink in the middle, then blended from the middle out. The little brown flower was the same, just with one color. The larger flower was scribbled more randomly so the white spots are more irregular.

Here is one of my finished, simple Christmas cards. I hope this has given you some ideas. Tomorrow I'll post about upcoming Certification classes. Next week we have some exciting announcements for 2011, so stay tuned!