Colorizing Hero Paste

Hi friends! Lydia here with a fun and simple way to custom dye your Hero Paste that will have you obsessing over custom color combos, I promise. 

Hero has 57 Core Inkers for you to work with – so imagine how many unique combinations there are. Someone needs to do the math – but it is in the millions for sure. 

I love to work with primaries, so for my Hero Paste experiment, I chose these reinkers: Ultra Pink, Summer Sky and Lemon Yellow. 

Here's what I recommend doing as setup before you colorize your pastes.

• Grab your white Hero Paste (or glitter or pearl), a Hero Palette Knife and your inkers of choice. 
• Apply temporary adhesive to the back of the card panel you will be working with and stick it onto a scrap paper that is larger than the size of your stencil.. 
• Set up a paper plate, craft mat or other smooth surface to mix your paste on. 
• Grab some tape for your stencil and tape it on top of your card panel.

If you're using multiple colors, like I am, I recommend a ratio of about 1 tsp. of paste to one drop of inker. If you are coloring a full card front, a tablespoon and three drops of inker should be plenty. 

Mix the inker into the paste with the palette knife – it will change the consistency a bit at first – but just keep mixing. When the color is even, the consistency will be too. However, a variation on this technique is to deliberately undermix the color so that you get darker and lighter streaks in the paste – just have fun!

Apply your colorized paste through the stencil like you normally do. I chose this fun and funky, modern Floral Trove Stencil – because the bolder and more open the stencil, the more color variation you will see, so keep that in mind.

Here's what mine looked like while drying – I wanted to see how the same colors looked on white and black cardstock. Notice on the black how it makes very bright colors look more pastel. 

I let the background be the star of this show for both cards, choosing small, delicate sentiments from this month's Folk Animals Bundle.

For the white background, I put it on a Pitch Black card base for contrast.  

For the Pitch Black panel, I left that at an A2 size because I love the drama of the black background.

I hope you've enjoyed this simple way to stretch your Hero Paste! Thanks for stopping by today – stay crafty!