Stampin' Blends!

Hi Everyone!  I am super excited to share the new Stampin' Blends with you today!! Mine arrived late yesterday and first thing today I sat down to use them. 
Stampin' Blends are a new line of Alcohol based markers.  They are similar to the Copic line, an artist quality brand of markers. They have a wonderful brush tip on one side a nib tip on the other, and each color has a dark and light version to blend together for beautiful shading. You can also blend two different colors together to get a fun look such as that of a fall leaf or a pretty flower.  This new line has been introduced to demonstrators only but you can get your hands on them early too because you can choose them as part of a Starter Kit when you join.  Starter kits can be made up of any $125 worth of products for $99 (+free shipping), but you can only choose the Blends until October 15th.  Click here to learn more about Joining. We have not been given a Customer Release Date yet, but when we do I will be sure to let you know.   Until then I will be playing with mine and seeing all that I can do with them.  I look forward to using them on many new projects and especially the "Just Add Color" specialty paper that I just got as part of the Buy3 get 1 Free Designer Series Paper sale going on now through October 31st.   Click here to see the sale.

 I am really happy with the deep colors and smooth coverage they give.  I thought I would make up a little comparison to see how they differ from other Stampin' Up! coloring mediums.
I kept with just a couple colors to start out.  Calypso Coral, Daffodil Delight, and Old Olive.  I tried the new Stampin' Blends,  Aqua Painter and ink, Stampin' Write Markers, and Watercolor Pencils.  On the Watercolor pencils I could have gotten some deeper colors but my hand was getting tired.  To get such intense color takes a lot of pressure on the pencil and lots of layers.  Waiting for the water to dry to add layers with the aqua painter was  also time consuming.  The new Blends give such nice coverage and they are so easy to use.  The colors are intense but you can achieve both light and dark tones.  The Blends are very nice to work with.  The original Stampin' Write markers are nice too, and you can use them directly on stamps, which you can't do with the Blends. 

The Blends are great because you can use two completely different colors to blend together a well.  If you were to apply a two different colors together with markers they would just lay on top of each other, they would not fade into each other or blend at the edges as you can do with the Blends.







Another nice thing about the Blends is that the brush strokes don't show when you are coloring large areas.  Notice the brush strokes on the right balloon that was colored with a Stampin' Write Marker versus the smooth color on the left.
You can also see where I used the Color Lifter to remove some color from the top right of the left balloon to make a shine appear as if light were bouncing off the balloon.









Check out the video to see how to use the blends in more detail. 

 Please feel free to ask me any questions! I am happy to help.