Today we want to share with you a really pretty and simple scrapbooking technique for creating texture with sand. We really love this technique. It’s easy, cheap, and adds a lot of interest to your piece.
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To create this look, simply mix sand with acrylic paint. The type of sand you choose will make a difference in the finished look. A fine sand will have a softer look, and a coarse sand will look, you guessed it, more coarse. We found our fine sand at Meijer, and the coarse sand we purchased from the Dollar Tree, but you can find both at a variety of stores. Although it may look as though you could easily brush the sand mixture off your layout, it’s actually quite sturdy.
Your sand vs paint ratio will depend on how you want it to look. If you want mostly paint with just a little grit, just add a little sand. If you want to create larger clumps of sand, add more sand to the paint. Our go-to recipe is approximately 2 ounces of paint mixed with 1/4 cup of sand, but sometimes we need to add a bit more sand. This creates a decent size batch of paint, so if you’re making a bigger batch and not going to use it all at once, mix it in a container that has a tight fitting lid. Your sand mixture can be stored in an air tight container, but may thicken a bit over time. Adding a little more paint will help bring it back to its original consistency. Below is a picture of our paint/fine sand mixture.
For this mixture, we used two different colors of acrylic paint – approximately 1 1/2 ounces of Plaid Apple Barrel in “white”, and approximately 1/2 ounce of Delta Creative Ceramcoat in “oyster white”.
Use a spoon or spatula to thoroughly mix the sand and paint. We used a paint brush and small sponge to apply it. If you’re covering an embellishment, you can even just drop it into your bowl of paint/sand and use a paint brush to move it around until it’s covered.
We used the fine sand mixture on this layout with the butterfly, using a small makeup sponge to dab the mixture onto our layout.
We also used our fine sand mixture to distress this necklace charm we found at a yard sale. We removed the bail with wire cutters, and used a makeup sponge to cover the charm.
And lastly, we dabbed our fine sand mixture onto the petals of this Prima Alabaster Collection flower using a paint brush.
We used our coarse sand mixture on a scrapbook layout called “New Beginnings”, which we wrote about in a previous post. Here’s a couple photos of how the coarse mixture looked on the layout, and on a clock embellishment we used. If you’d like to see more photos of this layout, click here.
We also used the gritty sand mixture to distress the face of this broken watch, to be used as an embellishment on a future project.
Once you’ve applied your sand mixture, you’ll want to let it dry completely, or overnight. Enjoy!
This post is part of a series of scrapbooking techniques called Scrap Basics. To see more Scrap Basics, click here.
If you use this technique on a project, we’d love to see it! Please share with us in our comment section or upload a picture to our Facebook page, and we may highlight your craft in a future post!
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