Card Making Basics: Adding Color - Gelatos (Pigment Sticks)

Gelatos are creamy pigment sticks that are best used on watercolor paper. Gelatos can be used directly from the tube or blended with water.

1. Using watercolor paper, apply the gelatos across the surface of the paper straight from the tube.

2. For colors with more vibrancy, rub and blend the colors using your fingers or a paper towel.

3. For colors with a lighter wash, use a paintbrush and water to wet and blend the colors.

Gelatos are still a new medium to me. I don’t often pull for them when creating, but using the steps listed gave me a chance to play with the medium, and I’m happy with how my cards came out! For my first card, I picked 3 colors: blue, purple, and pink. They’re specialty gelatos in that they have a shimmer look to them, so the pictures don’t do them justice. I first placed down my blue by rubbing the stick directly to some watercolor paper. Next, I used pink to follow the blue. Lastly, I used the purple to follow the pink. I later changed the order of the colors to blue, purple, and pink.

After getting the colors down by rubbing the gelatos onto the watercolor paper, I used a paper towel (did not want to use my fingers) to rub and blend the colors. This basically helped to fill in the spots where they gelato didn’t lay color. This gave me a very vibrant look as no water was used to rub the colors, but I didn’t get much of a blended look that I would have liked to have gotten.

For this piece of paper, I chose to die cut the words “Miss You” from it, and place them onto a color-splattered panel. I finished off the card with a few purple sequins to match the card. I kept this card pretty plain and simple.

The other way that I played with the gelatos was to add a piece of each gelato to a paint palette and add water to each color. I mixed the gelatos and water with a paint brush and then painted onto a sheet of watercolor paper to get a lighter, but more blending look. I began with blue this time, then purple, and then pink. I liked this order a lot better. I decided to use the final piece as a background. I finished off the background by stamping with a cling-mounted stamp. Then I die cut “You Are Loved” from some black cardstock paper. Lastly, I created a matte for my card panel in black and decorated with some clear sequins.