We all love a little shimmer and shine on our cards. The faux mother-of-pearl technique uses pearl acrylic paint and dye ink to create a lovely shimmery resist background. This is a really quick technique that only requires a few supplies to create unique pieces of card that shine like a piece of mother of pearl, and the pieces you create can be used as backgrounds or for die-cutting.

To create this faux mother-of-pearl effect, you will need pearl acrylic paint and some clingfilm. Place a small amount of the paint onto a craft sheet or plastic tray, scrunch up a piece of clingfilm and dab it into the paint. Dab off the excess paint to prevent applying the paint too thickly, and start randomly dabbing the cling film lightly onto the cardstock to transfer the paint. Continue to pick up more paint using the scrunched-up clingfilm and transfer it to the piece of cardstock until you have dabbed paint over the whole piece. Make sure you leave some areas of the card uncovered and leave the paint to dry. At this stage I would prepare several pieces of cardstock using the paint and set aside to dry. You can use up any leftover paint and you will only have to clean up the paint once! You can keep the pieces to use for later projects.

Once the paint is dry, sponge over the top of the paint using coloured ink. Distress Ink and dye ink work best for this as they can easily be blended allowing you to create faux mother-of-pearl pieces with different colours and tones. The shimmery acrylic paint acts as a resist so the ink sits on top of the random design. When you have finished adding the ink colours, mist a paper towel lightly with water and use it to buff the cardstock. The ink over the paint will come off and reveal the faux mother-of-pearl look.

This technique creates an easy but beautiful design to use on your projects. I hope you will give this technique a try.

1

Pour a small amount of pearl acrylic paint onto a plastic tray of craft sheet and place a sheet of scrap paper under the card piece

2

Scrunch up a piece of clingfilm and dip it into the pearl paint. Dab off the excess paint onto the tray so that the paint isn’t too thick when applying to the card

3

Dab the paint-coated clingfilm onto the cardstock randomly, picking up more paint as you need it, until you have dabbed paint over the whole piece. Be sure to leave some areas of white card

4

When the paint is dry, apply dye ink colours over the piece of card, blending the different colours

5

When you have finished adding the ink, mist a paper towel

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