Experimenting with Heat Embossing

When my family first got into card making, we used to do quite a lot of heat embossing. We had all the equipment and the technique was a staple in our card making routine. But, over the years since, I have gotten out of the habit of making cards like we used to and, as a result, have stopped heat embossing completely.

However, last week’s Simon Says Stamp Monday challenge was on the theme of embossing and so I decided it was a good time to revisit it. (You can see my entry in my previous post.)

It was a bit of a bit of a learning curve to get back into it, but I really enjoyed playing around and seeing what I could do with it.

Read on to find out how I got on with heat embossing.

My first step was to test all the things I had left over. There were a bunch of pens, some which had dried up, and some powders. We had a lot of glitter ones which didn’t work as well, but there were purple and silver powders that created a nice effect.

I then tested a couple of stamps. Both had quite fine details, but did end up coming out quite cleanly. It did take a few attempts to get good prints off though.

I wanted to try using embossing as an accent. I had done a few small paintings previously, so I chose one that I felt was lacking a defining feature. I used one of my embossing pens to draw a line across the middle and then heat embossed it with silver. It worked quite well, but I noticed that the powder stuck to the pen on the paint better than when the pen was just on paper. I did think the embossing was a nice addition, so something to consider.

I made an initial attempt for the SSS challenge. First I painted the tag with acrylic paint. Then I used a circle stencil and pen to create dots, and also added some squiggles, and embossed in purple. I then covered this in a light layer of gesso. I stuck the tag onto a card and drew a line across the middle of the card/tag and embossed it with silver.

I wasn’t happy with this attempt, but I liked the general idea so I decided to try it again. This time, after painting the tag, I used a teardrop shaped in pad and embossed that shape in purple. However, after doing this, I wasn’t really sure what to do next, so I left it.

I was really enjoying playing around with embossing, so I decided I wanted to try incorporating heat embossing into my normal artwork. I used an ink pad, circle stencil and clear powder to create a pattern of dots in the middle of the page and then painted over as normal. I liked the addition of texture in my work and it is definitely something I am going to pursue.

If you’d like to see more and keep up to date with the work I do, follow me on Instagram. I post my new experiments there almost every day.