Using Acrylic Shapes on your Layouts Part One
Acrylic shapes and letters are such a fun embellishment to add to your layouts. At first, looking at these products you may wonder what you do with them. Heidi Swapp offers a wide variety of shapes and alphabets, called Ghost Shapes, that I will be focusing on today.
These ghost shapes are made of a thin acrylic, or plastic-like material, that will not add any bulk to your page. They are thin, but not floppy.
There are two areas that I want to address today. The first area I want to cover is things that you can do to alter the color or look of the acrylic shapes. The second section of this topic will be covered in the next blog with different ideas on ways to attach them to your layout.
Paint the back of the letter or shape. Just use you regular acrylic paint and paint on the back of the shape. You cold even let the paint dry and then scratch some of the paint off to create a more interesting look.
Use a rub on on top of the acrylic shape. Rub ons are a fun way to customize your acrylic shapes. They should adhere to the ghost shape as well as they do to paper.
Chalk It. If you want a subtle change in color, you can add chalks to the back of the image.
Ink it. I have tries using my regular ink pads, but the color didn’t hold as well as I would have liked. I also tried using Stazon ink and that worked beautifully. Here is a card I made where the letters are inked. I then ran them through a Xyron machine to add adhesive.
Use alcohol inks. Alcohol inks come in little dispenser bottles that you can use to just drip a drop of ink right onto the back of the shape. Try using three different colors and moving the shape around to swirl the colors together. The effects are really cool. This can be very messy and the inks will stain your hands (and your clothes too if you are not careful.) I suggest wearing gloves while trying this so that you don’t have dirty fingernails for a week!
Have fun altering these fun shapes. But remember they are also fun to use straight out of the package!