More Experiments with Boring Gold Card and Other Backgrounds

I've just had a go at the last piece of boring gold card, which I'd embossed with the Cuttlebug - the one on the left in this picture:

Here it is now:

and a detail of it:

What I did was to heat emboss the raised embossing on the card, by rubbing the versamark pad gently over the surface. As usual, even after using my anti-static pad, this was far from perfect! Anyway I went ahead and heat embossed it in black. It didn't look too bad, but it was a bit stark, so I painted gesso over the surface, and then before it was dry, I rubbed it away with a piece of kitchen paper, leaving it in patches. Then I used a small pad to ink over the top with archival black ink to pick out the raised embossing again. Finally I scrunched up a piece of kitchen paper and used it to ink lightly over the whole surface with archival black ink to dull down the white gesso slightly.

After completing this, I thought I'd take one or two photos of the experimental background cards I've done recently.

Here's a detail:

Finally, here is another card for my Card Bank (on the right in the photo below), embossed with the Cuttlebug folder "Miniature Mosaic" which gives a lovely leather-like effect when inked with brown shades. In this case I used Tim Holtz Distress Inks first in Rusty Hinge, and then dulled down with Pumice Stone.