Tuesday, June 23, 2015

Art Journal Layout: Happiness Blooms From Within


Good morning friends!
Today I have a little something different to share than a normal card project.  I had a Friday evening last week completely all to myself...no kiddos and no hubby! Its been a long long long time since I hand any quiet time to myself like this! lol!  So for the evening, I literally buried myself into my art work.  It was a little while since my art journal found its way out onto my desk and I thought what a perfect opportunity to do something!

I wanted to get inky for this project and create a background that was two toned blue and green...to represent a blurry sky and grass. My overall goal was to create whimsical, bold and bright flowers that stood out over everything else.  I used dylusions sprays and a lot of water to get my background, but i think it turned out beautifully!

When I was finished with my background, I really had to let it dry for a while because it was saturated with water and ink. So while that was drying, I took a sharpie and drew large flowers of different shapes onto a piece of water color paper....


You can see a bit of the journal page peeking out on the left :). Also on the page, you can see black text that I stamped...this was a stamp that's been in my stash since the beginning of my crafty time and honestly, I have no clue as to where this came from! I hate when that happens! lol  You can also see that I too a stencil and used white pigment ink to get some soft white splotches of texture around the page as well. I like the soft look, especially once I added my gel medium over it...it took some of the distinctness away from it, which drew more attention to the texture paste that was created with the same stencil in the end.

I used my Gansai Tambi Watercolor paints to water color the flowers. I feel that these took FOREVER to dry...but I think it was because I need to upgrade my watercolor paper...lol.   After the flowers were all dry, I fussy cut them out and began adhering them to my page either by gel medium or foam adhesive. The large purple flower on the right page was adhered with foam so it stood out over top the other flowers.  For the leaves, i just glued the tip of the leaves down so they were more dimensional and popped off the page.  I used my Faber Castell big brush markers to add highlights and shadows across my page. Lastly, I added my quote in black glitter thickers...and that was it!  Here are a few close ups of what my page looks like:










Here are some of the supplies that I used in today's project:




Thanks so much for stopping by! 
See you all again soon!

2 comments:

  1. Wow, wow, wow! so vibrant and colorful. I LOVE this! I am impressed that you made your own flowers, simple but so creative. I've seen stamps similar to these. I HAVE to save this photo so I can cheat from you. :-)

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  2. Nicole, this is brilliant! I love the bright colors you chose to work with. Your background turned out beautifully, and your hand drawn flowers are gorgeous! The pop of white really sets them off. Thanks so much for joining us at the Simon Says Stamp Monday challenge this week!

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