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!  ;)