My kind of trouble! :)

Oh my gosh!  Had so much fun this weekend!  I went to a weekend retreat not too far from town, but far enough to feel like I got away from the city, work and daily stresses.  After long deliberation on what to pack because honestly, I feel like packing up my whole room usually, I decided on packing stuff to work on some more art journal/mixed media pages.  Now I have to admit I'm pretty new at this and really slow..... so when I say it took me 7 hrs to do one page, I'm being serious.  LOL  Of course, in between that time was drying time, chatting/visiting with the other ladies time, eating and coffee/wine breaks... well you get the idea!  :) 

My first page all I knew is that I wanted to use my brick wall stencil and some embossing paste.  That was my starting base.  So, from there I decided on what background colors I wanted to use and I used TH distress paints in a variety of different colors, earthy tones.  Sorry, I didn't keep track of exactly what I used.  I blotched them all over the page randomly and then used a baby wipe and blotted the colors around.  Keep in mind that all the pages have to be gesso'd before working on them or you get major bleed thru which happened to one of my previous pages and I had to redo the page on the opposite side.  :(  Once I was happy with the look of the background and dried it, I took a stencil and some Wendy Vecchi archival ink and randomly placed the grid type stencil around the page.  Next, I took my brick wall stencil and Wendy Vecchi white embossing paste and put it where I wanted.  I wanted a tall wall effect.  I had to dry between sections because the page is bigger than the stencil itself.  ;)   I also did the top portion of the left side.  Once, that was dry I used TH distress inks to color my stone wall.  I think I used, wild honey, rusty hinge, pumice stone, frayed burlap, walnut stain and aged mahogany.  I love how it turned out.

I rummaged thru a pile of papers and found the birds and the flowers in one of TH's newest paper packets.  I cut out the images and used multi medium matte to seal them down.  I also cut some grass blades with a fiskars punch and made a variety of different depths for the grassed area using plain green paper and some patterned paper.  I fixed them to the book in my layers.  Once that was dry I used some different color gelato's and blended them around and overtop of the grass for some dimension.  I had a left over TH die cut fern leaf that was sprayed with Lindy stamp gang sprays and the colors were perfect so I grabbed that out of my left over stash and glued that down as well.   While looking thru my left overs I came across the honeycomb and little center cut outs that I had used on a project before and had pieces left over.  So I placed them where I wanted them and then adhered them down.   Next I took some clear rock candy stickles for the roses and smudged that on for a soft glittery appearance.  While that was drying I looked for some bees.  I found a stamp in CTMH that had these cute bees, so I stamped them, colored them with distress markers and cut them out.  I decided that before I glued them down I needed to add some visual dimension to the honeycomb and so I used a fine point ink pen and a white gel pen and drew lines around to create a 3D effect. Glue down the bees.  I had a neat bushy kind of looking punch and used that to create the bushes along the bottom as well and sealed them down. 

Lastly I wanted a bit more depth to the outside part of the pages and so I used my black gelato and smeared it around the edges and blend it around with my finger.  I used lettering stamps and sentiments to do my title.  And I still felt like it needed some more dimension so I found some butterfly pop up stickers and little coordinating flowers and stuck them down. 

Yup I think I like it!  I'm happy!  Here are some photo's I took. 

 

 

I hope you enjoy looking at all the fun stuff on this page as much as I had fun making it!  Cheers!!!  Would love to get your feedback on my pages.  :) 


Thanks again Nicole for the cute little note paper below!  Love it! 
CanadianNickel Scrapn