Documented Faith week 7 (catch up)

As I have been having so much fun in my art journal, I am a bit behind on my Documented Faith planner.   I played catch up today.

To reinforce my page, I covered the whole page in masking tape.

I painted the page with black gesso, that I had made by mixing black paint with white gesso.  I then took my hair dryer and dried the page.

I took some cardboard, painted it and stamped it on my page.

I then took some bubble wrap, painted it and stamped it on my page.

I used my homemade foam stamp, painted it and then also stamped them on my page.

Every week, Stephanie Ackerman sends us an email for Documented Faith.  A few times, she has included a beautiful copy of one of her art pieces.  This was one of those weeks.  I printed out the email, cut out the verse and her beautiful art piece and glued them on my page.

I love how it turned out! 

Unnamed

I had SO much fun doing this piece!  I had the inspiration to do my background in BLACK gesso. Black is one of my favorite colors!   I didn't have black gesso, so I decided to make my own!

I took my white gesso and black paint and mixed them together in an old lunch meat dish.  Well, you know what happens when you mix white and black??? You get gray!   I just kept adding more black paint, to make it the color that I wanted.

I heavily painted my page.

I then used my hair dryer to dry the paint.

I have these pages that I use as my smoosh pages.  Whenever I have excess paint, I smoosh them onto these pages and it makes for some really cool designs.  I took one of these pages and punched out a bunch of squares.

I Mod Podged the squares onto the page.  I love the brightness of the colors against the black!

I had recently watched a tutorial on Pinterest about print making with a plastic baggie. I wanted to try it out, so I decided to try it on a scrap piece of paper.  I always do that with a new technique, because you never know how it will turn out.

I painted a neon pink flower on the baggie.

My daughter helped me. I flipped over the baggie onto the paper and she used the brayer to push it down on the paper.

This is how it turned out. I don't think that I used enough paint.

Take 2!

 

The glitter paint just smooshed all over the page, so you're looking at my new smoosh page!

I just started playing with my paints and made some different designs on the page.

 

I have been pinning more and more mixed media ideas on Pinterest.  I had come across a pin for making your own stamps out of foam.  I cut some shapes and glued them onto some cereal box pieces.  I cut the circles out and my daughter glued them on. She is my big helper! 

I painted the shapes and then stamped them on the page.

I also painted some bubble wrap and made it part of the design.  

I took my art journal outside, dripped and slinged some paint on the page.  That was fun!  The bright colors on the black look very intergalactic! 

I used my handmade circle stamp, painted it with pearlescent white paint and stamped it on the page.
I added some little paint accents and then I was finally done. 
I usually add some quote or words to my page, but I decided this page was good just as it was! 

Left side

 Right side

I LOVE LOVE LOVE how it turned out! So vibrant and colorful! Lots of my favorite colors!

Spread your wings

This project took me several days, because I was stuck on what I wanted to do! 

I started off with a dollup of Ocean Breeze and turquoise paint. I blended them together to create a new color.

After gessoing my page, I used this stencil to make large polka dots in the new blended color.

I love how it looks like this! 

I then sprayed a stencil with Heidi Swapp Color Mist in mustard.  I used my new brayer and rolled it onto the page.  

It was very subtle and I wasn't sure how I liked it.  I don't really like yellow, but it came across as gold, so it was ok.

More ideas were had!  Violet, neon purple, neon pink, charcoal grey and silver paint!

I did two coats of paint.  I like how the mustard stenciling only shows on the polka dots now.

Now, after I did this, I got stuck on where to go from here! After 2 days, I finally had an idea.

I had found these Wilton squeeze bottles at Walmart, for $0.74 each!  I figured they would be good for art purposes.  I mixed a 50/50 ratio of water and black paint in the bottle.

I laid an art tarp (I use an old sheet) under my book, circled the paint around the circles and let it drip down the page.  The water makes it more runny than usual.

This is what the page looked like when I was done dripping the paint.  I also dripped black drops around the page.  I love the splattered drop look!

I was looking at some things online and found a stamp in the Dyan Reaveley Ranger line that I really liked the quote from. "Until you spread your wings, you have no idea how far you'll fly." I used my mini alpha stamps and stamped it onto some white cardstock. I then took my brown ink pad and dirtied up the white, to give it an aged look.  

I stamped the date on a tag and ripped it in half.  I felt very Donna Downey-ish in doing so, as she loves to use "brown dot" tags in her pieces for her dates!  It is my first brown dot tag, even though it doesn't have a brown dot, lol! My hubbins even commented about that! He has seen me watch a gajillion of her videos!  And yes, I said a gajillion! 


I had some bird tags from a Michaels sale a while back that I also used on the page. They reminded me of my bestie, Shelby, because of our matching best friend tattoos!

I love the funness (I just made up a word there) of this page! 

Love is in the air

This past week, I was talking to my daughter's teacher from 1st grade.  She is the teacher that stays at the gate for after school pickup.  She was telling me that she has been reading my blog posts.  I was telling her that I did an art journal entry, but I didn't really care for it.  She said that I should blog about it anyways, even if I didn't like it, because it's all a learning process.  So, here you go, Mrs. McKay!

I had just finished doing the newsletters for work and I had all these empty stamp sheets left over.  They have little stickers on all the sheets and I decided to use those on my pages for texture.

I just randomly stuck the stickers down, all over both pages. (Sorry, for the blurry picture!)

A closeup

I took some Valentine paper and ripped it and then Mod Podged it on the sides of the pages.

I took my 12" Heidi Swapp stencil and silver Recollections spray mist and sprayed the page. I ended up not liking the silver spray (looked dirty), so I lined back up the stencil and sprayed again with Heidi Swapp Color Mist in red.  It looked much better and the silver on one page gave the red a nice outline!

I had bought a set of adhesive stencils at the 99 Cent Only Store. I stuck it on the bottom of the page and spray misted it with Heidi Swapp Color Shine in black.  It was too faint and again, I didn't like it, so I opted to paint it with black paint.

I then did the heart in red.

The color smudged a bit on the birds, but I think that it was the spray mist, not the paint.  See, another learning curve! 

I took some Valentine stamps I had and stamped them on the page.  I wanted this page to be love themed, because my husband and I had just celebrated our 12th wedding anniversary!   

I really should have stopped here, but the page still looked unfinished to me!  So, I pulled out my Valentine stickers and added them on the page.

So, here is my finished page.  It's not my favorite piece, but I do like the birds!

Color my world!

This art journal spread was inspired by an Instagram post that I saw by Amy Tangerine. She used washi tape and watercolors.  Last week, I had bought the Target brand watercolor gel crayons and I wanted to try them out.  I picked out some washi tape in a rainbow of colors! I knew my 8 year daughter would love this!

After gessoing my page, I stuck 3 strips of each color at the top of the page. (Except the floral pattern, which I was using for brown, I did 4 strips of it since it was so thin!) 

I then took the gel crayons and colored down from the washi tape.  

This is what the page looked like with all the colors of the gel crayons.  Now, I have never used these before, so I wasn't exactly sure how they worked.  I took a water bottle and sprayed the page.

Immediately, the colors started to run!  I LOVE it!  

I sprayed it again and then took a blow dryer and dried it.  I had put a rag under the book and newspapers under each page to protect the previous pages, but the colors still ran.  

Apparently, when I gessoed the page, I didn't get a thick coat on this part of the right page (this is the backside of it).  The colors seeped through, so I just took some masking tape and covered it up.  When I do my next layout, I will just gesso all over the tape. 

I really like the entire page and kind of wanted to leave it as is, but I felt like it needed some words.

I used neon purple to paint "Color my world".  I really like how this turned out!