100 Days of Tombow

I was very excited to be contacted by the lovely folks at Tombow to participate in their special 100 Days of Tombow Centennial Celebration.  Teaming up with 100 Bloggers to show their creativity and the versatility of Tombo products, Tombo has committed to providing $100 of product per participant to the Council for Art Education, a non profit group dedicated to promoting and supporting art education.   That's up to $10,000 of fabulous product for future generations of artists and crafters.  Of course I jumped at the chance to do my part.  Above are the lovely products I was sent.

I had never worked with water based markers so I focused my attention on the Dual Brush Pens.  These are dual tipped with both a brush and pen tip.  The colors are from the Grunge set, the first batch using the brush tip, then the same colors blended with a water brush, and finally the pen tip.

I started with a background stamp brushed with the brown with some darker colors in several areas and stamped on ordinary cardstock. 

I then tore around the image (tear towards you if you want the rough edge up)and spritzed it with a mister.  Control the bleed by blotting with a paper towel until you get the effect you want.  The card stock curls a bit and starts to look old and kind of creepy, so to add to the grunge factor, I decided to add a faux burnt edge by using the black, gray, and more brown around the torn edge and brushing with the water brush. Really looks like I took a match to it.  Perfect or a Halloween project, don'tcha think?

 I then wanted to experiment with coloring a stamp.  If you are using a rubber or clear stamp, be sure to use a permanent ink, but I wanted to use a digi, so I cut a piece of watercolor paper and taped it to some copy paper in order to get it to feed through my printer.  I was very pleased with the subtle shading I was able to achieve with the brush tip and water brush and used every color in the set to complete my image.  To crisp it up after it was all colored, I outlined it all with the pen tip which defined everything perfectly.

It was also the first time I've ever used a dot adhesive stamp runner and I was quite impressed.  I especially loved the "stamp" feature at the end which allows you to stamp a small square of adhesive wherever you want it.  WooHoo! The final project is a pretty creepy wall hanging.   Hope this doesn't scare the folks at Tombow too much.  LOL

Thank you Tombow for allowing me to participate in your fabulous program and here's to you and your next 100 years of success.