  Distressed Gesso Background Technique By Trish Bayley
Gesso really is an amazing medium for using on paper and card stock. You only need a little bit and you can achieve stunning distressed effects! And the best part is that its so easy!! I tend to use Gesso to prime 3-d objects I’m going to stamp on; for example; wooden boxes, dominos, formica tiles etc, its wonderful stuff as it takes a slick surface and gives it a nice toothy grain for you to stamp and add your colour on! Gesso can be purchased at all Art shops and it is guaranteed to last you a while! Especially if you are only going to use it for creating backgrounds with as a little really DOES go a loooong way! Try it yourself and see… Materials Used:
* You CAN use pigment inkpads (i.e. Brilliance) if you prefer but you can only use them on matt card stock. Rubber Stamps Used:
Before You Begin: 
First of all if your gesso is the thick paste variety you will need to thin it down. To do this mix the gesso in a plastic container with a little water using a brush; you want the consistency of thick school white glue – not too thick but not too thin. It’s advisable to protect your work surface with scrap paper as this technique can get a little messy! But that’s the FUN part! This technique will work on any type of card stock – I did some experimenting to see if it would work on gloss or matt card stock best and it works on BOTH – it even works on VELLUM! Different types of papers and card stocks create different intensities with the inks and gesso resist effect. My personal favourite for the distressed gesso background technique is to use torn papers from an unwanted book as it creates a wonderful layered grunge collage effect and the words on the page are still visible underneath the gesso and the inks. How To Create: Step One – Laying The Base Colour
At this point you will have a background that may look something like these examples below:
Step Two – Distressing the Background Once your base colour is set down as described above, you are ready to progress and build up your layers to create the distressed gesso look. Its worth remembering that there are no hard fast rules as with all backgrounds and stamping techniques, the key is to experiment and explore using the gesso, inks and stamping together to come up with something you feel comfortable with. This is how I created mine; for the sake of the directions I am going to tell you how I created the Distressed Gesso Backgrounds using the bottom 2 examples you can see directly above this typing (i.e. the book pages).
Think about the colours you are using together, you don’t want to create a colour clash. This technique works best if you use shades of the same colour scheme. For example for the book pages I used lots of different shades of red dye inkpads together – cherry red, barn red and port red.
Step Three – Distressed Stamping With Gesso:
For example the two examples below were stamped using Barn Red Memories Dye Ink Pad which complimented the distressed background
Experiment! Use baby wipes to remove colour in areas to create interesting effects. One cool effect I discovered was if you stamp with black memories inkpad, let it dry for a colour of seconds then gently swipe over the black ink with a baby wipe to remove some of the colour – this makes the image look kinda half there and not there, and it gives a great collage effect, see example:
More Distressed Gesso Background Art And Finally….. That’s not all! Did you know you can also STAMP with the gesso?! Simply sponge your stamp with the gesso, stamp onto card stock – immediately wash off the gesso from your stamp. Heat set the gesso on your card/paper. Sponge over to create a gesso resist and voila! Unique Stamped Gesso Resist Art! Here is a card I created earlier:
Art and Words By Trish Bayley 2004 |
I was playing around with my gesso recently to see if I could do anything DIFFERENT with it and here are the results of my findings….
DISTRESSED GESSO BACKGRONDS!
