Colorburst - Glossy Photo Paper (Long Post)

As promised I am giving you a little in depth look at colorburst on glossy photo stock. I already used it on matte stamping paper from Tim Holtz that is similar to photo paper just more matte than glossy and I should also say it has a nicer weight to it than matte photo paper. You can see examples of those backgrounds here and here. Note- If you just want to see the card skip to the end. 

I also have tried this powder on watercolor paper and I'm gonna say it isn't worth the bother unless you paint with it as I did here.

When I tried the watercolor paper the first thing I noticed is it just doesn't carry the vibrancy you think it would and I think the problem is you can't flood the paper enough to saturate the paper while diluting the powder enough to get that splashed background effect. It either fades in color or doesn't expand.

I wanted to show you how glossy this paper is and then took images without the the light reflection so you could better see each panel .

See the gloss that helps retain the vibrancy on this paper. When I first misted the paper with water after sprinkling on the powder I really expected it to ruin the paper but it didn't. There were no thin water areas or warped parts of this paper at all.

 

I was a little to heavy handed with the purple and after misting heavily with a water bottle you can see that purple just took over. The nice thing is you can sprinkle a bit of powder here mist it, let it dry then use another powder in a second area, mist it and you have a nice balance of color as seen on the panel below.

I will say if you saturate the paper fully it tends to puddle and like most watercolor papers will run, However having it puddle as I did in the panel below you can then use it as an ink and stamp with it. 

 Yep you can stamp with it albeit I didn't spend a lot of time finessing the right consistency of how watery your pool of color is but you can see it does work in a messy kind of way. I suspect if you tighten up how watery your pool is you can get cleaner images. I was just purely experimenting and some images are better than others but it can be done. I also stamped off excess and then stamped on my panel and had better luck.

Now you might be thinking I have too much of one color and want to add another color so you sprinkle powder on top of your existing color, this is where it fails because the product dries fairly quick it won't meld into the bottom color as shown below.  What you end up with are these grainy looking spots. Now I tried this with watercolor paper first and got the same effect that's why I started getting disappointed with this product, if I am using watercolor paper I expect to be able to keep adding color and blending it, you just can't with this stuff.  See those elongated dots well no matter how much water I applied they just wouldn't meld and end up sitting on top of the bottom color. 

Now my favorite part. I was using a splat mat and this powder does end up with remnants of powder here and there kind of like glitter and I found a bunch on my work surface so I did the very thing Tim Holtz does when you have excess ink on the mat, I spritzed it with water then pressed the panel into all that excess spots of color and went back a second time kind of swiping in the mess and this was my result below.

And you can see how glossy and vibrant it is with the light hitting it. 

Lastly using a card using the colored panel for my background and it looks amazing. This is a fun way to have a background other than watercolor which I find this much more easy to use or patterned paper or even stamps. In fact you could very well stamp on top of this but I love the pretty splashes of colors all melded together so I will let it showcase its vibrant colors on its own.