Proudly Canadian

Proudly Canadian

Monday, February 9, 2015

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.  :)







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