Art Journal page… and not everything worked out!

Hi everyone :)

You know how not everything works out the way you ‘planned’ by sometimes it all comes good in the end?  Well that was what happened with my art journal page on Saturday. 

Having said that… I’ve learnt HEAPS by playing :)

I started off thinking that I wanted to do a canvas page so I cut some canvas to the right size and sewed it to a piece of plain card… thinking it would give it stability… more on that soon.

I was keen to try some image transfer techniques so I printed (on my ink jet printer) some of the images I’d used on my latest Feel Good Friday.

Then I got out my Reeves Gel Medium and got busy painting the canvas where I wanted my biggest image to go.

Next came the image which I burnished with a spoon… only because I couldn’t find my bone folder LOL (I’m going to have to create a basket for my basic tools)

I did EVERYTHING I’d seen on the You Tube tutorial and was super excited to see my image transferred… but it just wasn’t to be!  What I ended up with was a very faint image of the picture and it was REALLY pink!  One happy little accident though… it did leave a wonderful texture on the picture!

I wasn’t giving up just yet so I got out my Claudine Hellmuth multi-medium gel.  This does image transfers from ‘laser copies’ but I didn’t have laser copies so I figured I’d just give it a go anyway.  I followed all the steps above but with this gel you have to let it dry COMPLETELY so out came the heat gun to get it dry.  Then you have to spray with water to rub the paper away and reveal the image… here’s how it turned out:

Considering that image was from my ink jet printer I was pretty pleased with the results!  I figured that at this point I had nothing to risk so I re-did the first picture using Claudine Hellmuth’s gel… I even used the original picture that didn’t work the first time and voila!

It was at this point that I tore the card away from the canvas because the card was all buckled from the water and no amount of drying was going to get my page flat again!

Next I got out some of my paints to add a wash and ‘fill in’ the blank areas.

I want over the whole page with a very watery wash of white which I then rubbed away from the images with a paper towel.

Add in a bit of yellow ochre for some antiquing.

Then some blue and green to create a soft feel.

The lower image was still really pink (much pinker than it appears in the photos) so I got out my watercolour pastels to start adding in some of the colours.

I used a wet paint brush to ‘smoosh’ the colours around and keep them in the style I wanted.

I smooshed in a bit more paint to get rid of the ‘line’ between the big image and the rest of the page.  Next came a bit of charcoal pencil to give the image some depth. 

I remembered that I had a cool tree stencil that might look a bit like vines so out it came along with some paint.

I dried off my vines with the heat gun and then added a bit of gold paint to highlight some of the leaves and vines.

At this point I was pretty happy with it so I did the date stamp tag and added it.

I couldn’t get a good photo of my page on Saturday night but on Sunday I took by art journal outside and got this one which I’m fairly happy with:

So I’ve finally done some image transferring with gel medium and I’m thrilled with the results… and with how much I’ve learnt about this technique!

If you’ve tried image transfers and have some ‘handy hints or tips’ to share I’d love to hear from you xx