Oddball Art Co. Tutorial - Shaving Cream Backgrounds

Hello stamping friends! I'm here today with a new Techniques & Tutorials post for Oddball Art Stamps. This technique is another funky, fancy and fun background paper technique. You know I love those! 

Shaving Cream Marbled Backgrounds

This technique has been around FOR.EV.ER. And it's incredibly easy. My kids have done this one before too; it's messy and fun and produces unique results every time. Intrigued?? Let's go!

Ok! Assemble your supplies. You will need some nice cheap foam shaving cream (Gel doesn't work nearly as well. Get foam. The cheaper the better.), inks or watercolor paints, a tray of some kind to create the magic in, something to scrape the foam off the paper once you dip it, and something to swirl the foamy ink around before you apply it to your paper. You'll see what I mean.

 

The first step is to choose the colors you will want for your background. As you can see above, I have chosen red, green, blue and black, to match up with the colors I used in Image No. 252 Fearsome Fiona. Take your tray and add a layer of shaving cream to it. As you can see above, I used a plastic tray that some ground turkey came in. I washed it out and it was perfect. The nice thing about these is you can either wash and reuse when you're done (no worries about stains), or throw the whole mess away and start over next time you want to do some messy art!

Awesome! A nice layer for our ink or paint to sit on. Start adding drops. Anywhere you want. You can't do it "wrong", it's all right!

Yay! More colors?

Now, we are going to swirl/marble the inky shaving cream around to get some funky random patterns to imprint on our paper. A note - I pre-cut several sheets of plain white cardstock to A2 size (4.25"x5.5") before I started this project. These will be the papers that get marbled.

You can see that I used a stylus here for my swirling. I might recommend something more like a popsicle stick that has 2 sizes you can manipulate to change the way your pattern comes out. The stylus was quite skinny and I had to swirl a lot. 

 

Yay! We've swirled, and now we place our paper splat down on top of our marbled, inky, shaving cream masterpiece. We're having fun now! 

Yikes! It looks kinda ugly! Let's fix that. Once you place and press (not too hard) the paper into the inky shaving cream pot, peel it out by one corner. I put my tray on a scrap piece of cardboard, so I put the foamy paper down just next to it after I lifted it out of the tray. You will now want to scrape the foam off RIGHT AWAY. You don't want the paper to get any soggier than necessary. You can see I used a bone folder for this task, but you can use anything with a straight, flat edge. Ideally you want to scrape only once, because setting the scraper down a second time will leave a line on your paper where the edge touches.

Here is how it looks after it's scraped. Every piece will be unique. For this piece I started at the top and scraped downward. I wiped the bone folder off over the sink (or trash) and then moved on to the next piece. After 4 of these quarter sheets, I added another layer of foam and more ink, swirled it around, and did another 4 quarter sheets. 

You're done! Once they are dry, you can use them just like any other paper you've ever used. Decorate and assemble the rest of your project in any way that you envision. I'm a cardmaker, so this is going to be a card! I created the final project using Image No. 252 Fearsome Fiona, which I've colored with Copics and Prismacolor pencils. The bat is a die from Fun Stampers Journey. The other dies are all from Gina Marie. Ribbon and tear drops from my stash.

I hope you enjoyed this tutorial. If I've inspired you to create something, please link it up so I can take a look! Have a fabulous day and thanks for dropping by.