Are you still talking?

I love it when I get to bring someone into my world of fun!  I got my SIL into art journaling and I hope that this will continue to be something that we can do together for a long time to come.  She is going to take a different approach with it and do Bible art journaling allowing her to express herself thru her faith.  As a start I have her set up with a Strathmore mixed media journal to practice with me some different paint, doodling, stamping etc techniques and get used to the different mediums that she can use before working in her bible.  I think once she really gets into it she'll be hooked like so many of us are.  :)   So today, while I took her thru a few steps and different techniques to start on building layers for a background, I did my own page along with her.  Though our techniques were the same our pages totally took on different entities.

To build the background I selected 3 different distress paints and over a previously gesso'd page, I heavily smeared the paint in batches around the paper on both sides.  I then misted the pages with water and folded them in on each other and pressed the paints together.  When I pulled them apart I took a baby wipe and blotted the inks a bit more to blend them together.  I used very soft toned colors.  I was demo'ing, for my SIL, how to dilute acrylic paints with water to thin them out so that I could splatter some color onto the page.  I just happened to grab a bright raspberry pink in distress paint and used a stir stick from our Starbucks coffee that she brought us.  I wanted to show her how she could use ordinary objects from around her house to create textures and patterns on her page.  So, I splattered some pink onto the page and then once again closed the pages to smoosh them together.  I made larger circle splatters on the page which I thought was kind of cool   I then had to pick out a stamp I wanted to use to get my theme started.  I used the cute owl from the Dina Wakley set which I think is adorable!  Next, I added some Dyan's dylusions mushroom stamps to the bottom and some leaves to the top using Wendy Vecchi archival inks.  I outlined the leaves with a black sharpie marker, and then colored in some water color pencils to add depth and color dimension to the leaves and a water brush to blend them.  Next, I shaded around the leaves with a charcoal pencil for some added depth and used the pencil to draw a vein in each leaf.  I looked at the mushrooms and wasn't sure how I wanted to color them so I grabbed Scattered straw distress spray and sprayed over top of the mushroom to add some extra color into the background.  I also grabbed Aloha avocado Lyndy stamp gang spray and sprayed that around the border of the bottom part of the page to bring a bit more green into the page.  Once dry, I used a variety of charcoal pencils from light sepia up to dark sepia and white charcoal and black charcoal to create my mushrooms.  I used some Lyra aqua crayons to color in the owl and water colored him.  Then I outlined him in charcoal as well.  The whole time I was working on finishing off my page my hubby wouldn't stop talking so I used my Dyan's stamp that says, Are you still talking?  LOL  A bit of a play on what was happening around me and what I wanted to happen on the page.  As I was looking at the page with my sentiment on it, I looked at the wide eyed owl, the mushrooms and the pink dots I had previously created and thought hey.... I'm going to turn the dots into bubbles.  So, my wide eye'd owl was being playful and happy with his psychedelic mushrooms and lots of floaty pink bubbles around him.  LOL  A bit warped but I thought it was funny.  I finished off the leaves, and the bubbles with a white gel pen for some highlight marks.  And that concluded the end of my page.  :)

Hope you enjoy!  :)    Hubby is still talking so I think I am going to show him my owl and what the page is saying!  LOL  Have a great night and have fun with your next page!  ;)

 

Think before you...

Love long weekends, and love when hubby goes down for a nap!   I had a few hours this afternoon to do a quick page.   My inspiration came from some Ephemera that I got from a real estate paper.  The back page had a photo of the three monkeys that were hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil.  I loved it.  The Realtor had a few cool sentences that I cut up and rearranged to make it say what I wanted.  :) This page was inspired by some real negativity I witnessed on Facebook today.  I am finding that people in general are truly judgmental and cruel, and the whole thing I read made me really upset and it was that event that inspired this page.

I started off with using a dotted stencil and gesso to create a resist.  I then took three different colored distress stains and a baby wipe and I started with the lighter color and made some smudges and immediately wiped with the baby wipe to remove from the gesso before it set.  Next, the mid color tone and added to another area of the page and immediately wiped again.  Last, the third and darkest color I smudged over the remainder of the page and again wiped with the baby wipe and blended the color.  Because the stains are water soluble I covered the page with clear gesso to seal but not hinder the color. Once dry, I took another stencil and the cornflower blue archival ink and created the water mark effects.   I looked for another stencil which was a harlequin style and a teal blue Lyndi stamp gang spray and added random patterns with the spray.  I really wanted to add a lot of color dimension and texture for the background, so I found a crackle stencil and another gold toned Lyndi spray and added that to the pages.  I used my heat tool to speed up the drying time.  I then found a brown shimmery Lyndi stamp gang spray and did some direct sprays into the circles.  It pooled and I tilted the book so that it would create some drip-age.  Now, once dry again, I took my ephemera that I cut out of the paper and the words and used my matte medium to seal them down.  I used some black gelato to smudge around the monkeys, and charcoal pencil to smudge around the words.  To finish the edges of the pages I used Potting soil archival ink and a blending tool to grunge up around the edges of the page.   And Whallah.... my page is done!  One of my quickest pages I have done but I love it!

I am almost done my book.  A few pages left to do in my book and then I'll have my first completed book done!  Whoohoo... :)  I'll be ready to complete the outside of the book cover and have my very first book to show off.  I'm excited!  :)   Thanks again for stopping in!  Hope you enjoyed.  xoxo

Let your dreams take flight...

Whoohoo... days off are great!  We've got freezing rain happening right now so I'm not even feeling a bit guilty for being at home and working on my art journaling.  It's not very often that I get to indulge this much in my art.  I decided today that since I had lots of time to work on this page that I would take photo's so I could give a better tutorial on what I did.  Think I'll go grab myself a cup of tea and get started... ok, tea in hand so let's get started.

I had bought a pack of soft pastels eons ago and had never tried using them so I pulled them out and started to play around with them.  I tried on some scrap paper to see if they were water soluble and they were not, they seemed to just pill the paper and make a mess.  Didn't like that at all so I thought I'd dry rub them.  I picked my colors for my background and rubbed them on and then took a paper towel and dry rubbed the colors to blend.  Quite liked the effect.  My goal today was to use products that I hadn't used before, which I have to admit left the options wide open!!!  LOL  Scrapbook hoarder yes I am!  

I wanted to use the doily stencil to achieve a soft delicate pattern on my page.  I wasn't sure if it would react with the pastel underneath the way inks do and I found out that it does not!  Great!  It left a nice clean white image on the paper.  I'm a happy camper.  

Lovely!  I wasn't sure what I was going to do next so I decided to seal it in with clear gesso.  This still allowed me to have some tooth to the paper to apply more mediums on top.  :)

I had gotten these beautiful Prima stencils last year and had only used a couple of them so far.  So, this was my chance.  Once I decided on this image, I had a person in mind that I wanted to dedicate this page to.  She's a lovely lady who I went to school with a long time ago in our elementary years and only recently reconnected via facebook again after all that time.  She now lives abroad and is of native origin and is a beautiful person inside and out.  I know life has been hard for her and I want her to know that there are people out there who thinks she's wonderful just the way she is!  So, with her in mind, I am proceeding forward with this page.  I used archival ink and a blending tool to transfer the image onto the page so I had an outline to work with.  I have to admit, I suck at sketching so until I get confident enough to try that, this is the way I need to go.  LOL  

I hadn't used my water color crayons in ages so I wanted to use them to color the image.  I picked out my colors and lay some color down and used a small brush to blend them.  I build layers of color to get the coverage and blend that I felt I needed.  Looking at my images now I realize that I need to go back in and fix the eye.  

Next up, hair... there's so much of it!  Yikes.  I chose 3 different shades of color, 2 browns and a black.  I used my paint brush and water and blended the colors with the narrowness of the brush to get fine hairline strokes.  Worked a lot better than I thought.  ;)

I did go back in and soften it up with more water later.  Now I needed to color the flowers in her hair and the feather.  So I used Dylusion colors and a paint brush to apply the color.  

Next up, I wanted to create a dream catcher.  I've seen tons of dream catcher pages being done currently and I wasn't exactly sure how I was going to go about this.  I rummaged thru my stash of goodies to find something that I could use.  God knows, I have enough stuff, and surely I must have something I can use!  LOL  Bingo!  I found a doily stencil and some feather stamps both that I hadn't used yet.  Perfect!  

I love my Ferro's for texture paste.  They have a smooth grittiness to them and a bit of shimmer and they dry so beautiful.  The texture is amazing.  I highly recommend them.  So, whilst that is drying I wanted to do some shading around my lovely lady.  I first used gelatos in complementing colors to the pastels below and intensify the colors around her like a halo.  Then I followed around the outline with a charcoal pencil to create some shadowing.  

Time to draw in some lines and stamp on the feathers for the dreamcatcher! 

The pencil wasn't a strong enough look so used Gelato's to create the lines.  I think I should have used the charcoal pencil instead but oh well... too late!  LOL  I used the saying "Let your dreams take flight"  from the same stamp set that I got the feathers from.  Also, looking at the photo now I am not happy with the feather in the hair.  It just seems a bit lost in there.  So I think I am going to glue down some string and attach it to the flower in the hair so it looks like it is meant to be there.  :)  Note to self:  Fix eye and add a string to the feather.  :)  

Another page done.  I hope you enjoy this page.  I will add the revised photo later once I fix the items on my list.  :)  Thanks for stopping in!  Drop me a line and say Hi!  I would love to get some feedback from you.  :)   xoxo

As promised:  I fixed my oversights and here is the finished page.  :)

 

Play day...

What's a girl to do when she gets stood up by a friend for a movie weekend marathon?  Pull out the art journal and start playing that's what!  LOL  Had fun and also got my February Dylusions challenge done as well.   So, do you want to see what I've been up to so far?  Let's take a look and I hope you enjoy.

This first page is for the Feb Dylusions facebook challenge.  The challenge was to use the color purple, hearts and skulls.  Love Dyan's stamps and colors and of course the sentiments rock!  "Caution-mood swing in progress"... perfectly depicts me today so I had to choose that saying.  I used a lot of layers to develop the background with Distress paints, Dylusion sprays, stencils, script stamp, TH tissue paper.  I sprayed paper with three different Dylusion sprays and then punched out the hearts.  I colored the images with copics.  The dangling hearts were stamped and colored with Dylusion sprays and a brush. I love how the sprays became very pastel in the background.  I sealed everything down with a matte gel medium.  The colors are so much more vibrant in real.

Next up...  I worked with lots of layering to develop this background again.  I used stamps, stencils, Lyndi stamp gang sprays, Izinks, gesso, napkins, distress paints, charcoal pencil.  I don't think I could do this page again if I tried.  I was in so much pain when I was working on this page that I don't remember how I put it together.  I had to take so many breaks in between building the layers that I can't give a tutorial on how I developed it.  Sorry.

And last but not least, this page took several days in the making as well and I completed it today.  I took inspiration from a Donna Downey video I watched along with techniques from a Christy Riopel course I took.   I used Gelato's to put down color onto the page.  Once the whole page was colored with a multitude of yummy color I put clear gesso over top.  One to help seal in the color and second so that I could continue to build more layers over top.  I then took a variety of stencils and started to build layers with sprays and distress inks. Next, I took some letters and laid them out and traced around them with a black gel pen. I took some gesso and worked it around the letters and outwards but only in some areas so that some of the color would become softer and other areas would retain the brighter colors.  I then took some TH rub ons and randomly placed them around the page.  I also cut out the butterfly from his tissue paper roll and another butterfly from a napkin I had.  I sealed them down with matte gel medium.  I took some grey gelato and smudged it around the lettering to emphasize it more and the brighter background colors really pop out.  I finished by taking walnut stain ink and blending tool and distressed around the edges and inwards a bit to deepen the border. The page really has a lot of dimension that is hard to see in the photo.  I love how it turned out.  And here it is...

Hope you enjoy'd the pages as much as I enjoy making them.   Not sure if I'll have time to start on another background tonight but you never know!  Once on a roll.... it's hard to stop.  Hope to see you back soon!  Would love it if you would leave me a note so I know you were here.  :)