Holidays and art journaling

Hey Crafters,

my girls and I have just returned from a week with my parents in the Alps. We had wonderful warm and sunny weather most of the time and spent a lot of time outdoors near the creek, which is our favorite place there. My daughters even complained that I "forgot" their Bikinis.

My parents are moving to a smaller place, where there isn't enough space for us to stay next holidays. So we also booked our summer holiday there at a local farm and now we're looking forward to it so much. They have cows and horses, cats naturally and I think sheep too. The girls are all crazy for it already.

Back home here, the cherry tree is in full bloom, and I admit I am glad to be back. I enjoy staying there, but it's always rather tiresome, because the kids need to be quiet and behave around my parents (my mother is ill and my father has always been one for calm and quiet).

Well, enough about my holiday plans, here's some crafty news:

I did it, I allowed myself the guilty pleasure of ordering twelve of Dyan's Dylusions spray mists.

I love to finally have them, I fell in love with them the moment I first saw them. And again a few weeks back, when I re-discovered Dyan's journaling for myself.

I also created my first page, just to try out some techniques with them...

I picked tones of pink, red and orange for the base, did some ghosting with stencils and a bit of regular stenciling. Then I covered the top and right edge with black and tried out the bleaching technique with my WPlus9 butterflies.

To do that, you stamp the images with black archival ink onto the black. Then you lift up the black color within the stamped images with  a wet brush and remove it with a paper towel. You may have to do that several times. Then you replace the black ink with another color, in this case I used pink and some orange for color variation. Dyan filled water brushes with her spray mists and uses them, but I didn't want to invest in all these water brushes, so I just dropped a bit of the color onto a slick surface and used a regular brush to pick it up.

I stamped another butterfly on a separate piece of paper, colored it, cut it out and adhered it with the wings lose. Then I stamped some weeds along the bottom and added some faux stitching. The text is handwritten an cut out crookedly.

I am not really all that happy with it, I think the paper may have too much texture for this technique, and I feel like I don't have enough space to leave different pieces out to dry and work on several backgrounds at once.

I share my craft desk with my kids and there is the box with all the pens, pencils, tools and stuff on the desk as well, so I don't really have that much space to spread out on.
This has been bothering me for a while, because I'd really like my crafty area better organized, but I also don't want to spend a lot of money on new furniture or ruin the look of my living room even more.

Well, I'll keep pondering that problem, maybe I'll find a solution eventually.


Happy crafting
Ela

Mixed Media first try

Hi Crafters,

I've been seeing a lot on the internet lately about mixed media and art journaling, it really got me hooked. When I went to the art supplies store to get some more tape runner refill the other day - I've really used a lot of that lately, with all the inlay technique cards - and I found a pad of Canson mixed media paper I simply couldn't resist.I also found some matt gel medium, and got that too.

I am not thinking of it, as an art journal, that would probably just intimidate me, but I really would like to try out new things with it.

For my first "page" I chose a rather simple flower design to go with spring, which was in the air today:

I gessoed the page and used Gelatos for the background. Then I free-handed the coulds and flower from lightweight printer paper, stamped the clouds with a background stamp and glued them to the page. The flower I coloured with orange color mist and a brown tombow marker and glued it down too. The dragonfly is stamped, sponged with distress inks, fuzzy cut and also glued on.

Stem and leaves are free-handed directly on the page with tombow markers and the rest of the shrubbery is stamped.

For the letters, I sponged some thin watercolor paper with yellow distress ink, and sponged on some leaves through a stencil, for some texture. Then I cut the letters with my big shot and a Tim Holtz die.

To add shadows I tried replacing big brush markers with tombow, and it worked well enough. I really can't afford to buy yet another sort of markers...

So, there it is, my first "non art journal page".
And I learnt a few things already, like don't use distress inks in mixed media, for anything that's supposed to stay crisp. Sponging is ok, because if it smears a bit more with the gel medium - who cares...


Have a nice day
Ela