Spotlight on the sponge dauber

 Today I wanted to put the spotlight on a often over looked little tool. The sponge dauber:

It is really a handy little tool. It helps keep your fingers clean and gives you the ability to add a little soft color in a small area. I learned an new way to use this little tool when I was taking the online card classes Stretch Your Stamps 2. It was actually in a class on using floral builder stamps. To shade an image that has a solid area,  you can stamp over it with the same color or a darker shade of ink. But    you only want ink a little bit of the area to get a shaded look. How do you do that? You do that with the sponge dauber! It keeps your fingers clean and gets the ink where you want it.You take the dauber put it on your finger dab it into your ink (darker usually shows up better) and then dab the ink on to the area of the stamp that you want to shade. Then very careful line up your stamp over the already stamped image and stamp. Then you can have a image has shading that and stand out more than just a one color image.

A leaf background on a card using the a sponge dauber to shade.

I tried this on a card background using two different size of leaves. I used just the darker ink towards the bottom of the leaf to shade it. The sea horses on my card from my last post also have been shaded in the same manner if you look closely at them. This shading technique  also looks good on flowers too. So, the sponge dauber is a pretty handy little tool to have.