On a tangent: Another art journal page + tutorial :)

Hi everyone :)

When I created my journal page on Thursday I took HEAPS of photos and made sure that I got all the steps photographed so that you can see how it all came together. The actual page took me a couple of hours… but it was spread over a day because I had lots of jobs to do LOL Besides, going to get some groceries gave the modelling paste time to dry!

For those of you who like to see the ‘big picture’ of where I’m headed here’s my finished page in my art journal:

Here’s the photo that inspired my art page:

I really loved the colours and textures in the sunflower so I decided to have a go and see what I came up with.

I started off with some plain white cardstock and Tim Holtz tissue wrap which I’ve had for ages and never really used before… cool product! I stuck it down with the glue stick that was in my goodie bag from Creative Adventure. I’m not much of a glue stick girl but this one (Xyron) was actually pretty good.

After I stuck down the tissue paper I decided it was a bit plain so I stamped one of my old stamps over it… so love that I’m using stuff out of my stash again!

I wanted lots of depth and texture on the page so I created a brick stencil using my Silhouette with quite a lot of ‘grout’ showing and then I decided to play with a technique that I’d seen online.

For the technique you brush gel medium over the stencil to create a resist. I found ‘brushing’ wasn’t the best thing and ended up ‘dabbing’ it all over with the foam brush.

Remove the stencil and then let it dry… or if you’re impatient like me you can use a heat gun!

Next I got out my Pan Pastels (seriously loving this product!) and go over the page. The dried gel medium resists the Pan Pastel creating the ‘grout’. You can see I haven’t quite finished the ‘grouting’ in this photo but it kind of appears like magic when you’re doing it.

Then I sprayed the page with fixative to ‘set’ the pastels.

Next I wanted to add some colour… so I used a wet brush and three paint colours to create a bit of a wash. You can clearly see the ‘grouting’ through the paint.

When it dried (ok, yeah, I did dry it with the heat gun LOL) the colour got lighter so I decided to do another wash of the same colours over it to add more depth.

More heat gunning and I was a happy camper!

Then it was time to get to work on my sunflower. I ended up making my own stencil to the size I wanted out of Kraft cardstock. It makes cheap stencils!!

Then I used my cake decorating skills to apply the modelling paste over the stencil. I wanted lots of texture so I made sure it wasn’t all perfect!

It’s quite exciting lifting off the stencil because you’re never exactly sure how it’s going to turn out but this one worked really well.

Then you have to leave it to dry. I’ve found that trying to speed things up with the heat gun doesn’t really work for me so at this point I went and got my groceries LOL

Once the modelling paste was dried I decided to add some Glass Bead Gel to the flower centre to give it a bit more texture. And yes I let that dry naturally too!

Then the fun began! I got out my Pan Pastels… they REALLY stick to the modelling paste (I did lots of layering and sprayed with fixative in between to build up the colours the way I wanted them).

Then it was time to work on the flower centre but I found the pastels really do not stick to the glass bead gel very well at all!

Hmmm… ok then… lets try paint!

The paint definitely did stick but it looked a bit ‘flat’. One thing I know is that pan pastels WILL stick to paint so out they came again!

Then I decided to add a little bit of gold and got out my metallic rubs… awesome!

I was getting pretty happy with it all at this point but it just ‘needed something’. I went in search of ‘something’ but had no idea what I was actually looking for when I came across some word stamps I’ve had for YEARS! I think they might be Heidi Swapp ones but I’m not completely sure. I used Versa Mark and gold embossing powder to apply the word.