Project of the Week ~ Masking With Rubber Cement

Hi there everyone! Cheri here with a new Project of the Week to share. It’s called “Masking with Rubber Cement”.

You can purchase masking fluid in many art departments and online in many locations. However, you can also get the same results by using plain old rubber cement and it’s a whole lot cheaper.

Here is one of the projects I made using the technique I’m going to show you.

For this card I used RI Stamps #9114-I “Heart Air Balloon” and the sentiment is #2505-H “The Very Best…”.

Here are the supplies you’ll need for this project.

Watercolor Paper, Rubber Cement, Small Paint Brush (for applying the rubber cement), Assortment of Distress Inks or watercolor medium of your choice, VersaMark Embossing Ink, White Embossing Powder, Waterproof ink and your choice of stamps. Paper Mask for balloon image. (Note: I used my MISTI stamp positioning tool for stamping my images)

Stamp the Heart Balloon stamp onto the watercolor paper panel, in the area where you’d like the “front” balloon to be. Stamp with VersaMark Ink, sprinkle with white embossing powder and heat emboss. Note: When stamping, be sure you get a good stamped image with the ink. Sometimes it takes two or three times to get a good impression on watercolor paper.

When cool, use the paper mask to cover this stamped and embossed image. Again, place the balloon where you’d like it to appear behind the front one. Repeat the inking process, apply the embossing powder and heat emboss.

I taped my card panel down with painter’s tape on a piece of board I use to keep the watercolor paper flat while adding water. It reduces warping.

Using your small paint brush, apply the rubber cement to the center of your images or to any area you’d like to mask (preventing watercoloring to color the area). Be sure to get good coverage in the areas you want masked. Now, wait for it to dry… it takes about 10 minutes.

When your rubber cement is dry, you can now apply your watercolor (with a clean brush, NOT the one you used for the cement). You can give the background a wet wash and apply color that way or you can apply your wet watercolor straight to the paper. Both effects are quite nice. I’ll have an example of the wet watercolor to paper application at the end of this post.

For the wet wash, just “paint” your watercolor panel with clean water. I smooshed the Distress Inks on an acrylic block and picked up some color with the brush I used to apply the water to the watercolor paper and dropped each color in the area where I wanted it.

After your background is as you like it you can remove the rubber cement by simply rubbing it off with your finger.

In this photo you can see where some of the watercolor got in areas where I didn’t have enough rubber cement coverage. I fixed that by taking a very small brush and just wetting those areas and dabbing it off with a paper towel.

Now just decorate your card as you’d like it.

Here’s a second card I did using the wet paint to dry paper. The same process was followed except for that.

Stamps used for this card are #10303-H “Daisy Outline Large”, #10302-E “Daisy Outline Small”, #10319-F “Leaf Outline Slender” and #10321-H “Stem Outline”. The sentiment is #1112-E “Just a Note”.

I hope you enjoyed this and you give it a try.