Saturday 18 February 2017

Journal52 #7: Dawn

As soon as I saw the prompt for this, I immediately had the song from the musical 'Hair' in my head.  It didn't take long to decide what the layout would be.  I tried out my new collection of Aqua Tints for the background; gorgeous colours which go a long way!


The first step was to stamp the main Just Truckin' stamp designed by Sheena Douglass as part of her Groovin' 60s collection directly onto the journal page, using Jet Black archival ink.
Once dry, the entire image was painted with Pebeo drawing gum, as I didn't want to have to cut out a mask!  The gum is water based, so it doesn't damage your brushes and goes on blue, so you can see the areas you have protected.  This was then dried with a heat gun.
 




Next came the fun part.  I wanted a rainbow theme in the background, so I just had to try out different colours of Aqua Tints to help me choose the ones I liked best.  In the end I chose (from top to bottom) #12, #37, #30, #21, #7, #2 and #56.  I barely had to put any of each colour into my palette and even though I gave each section 5 spritzes with a water brush, the colours remained vibrant as I painted them across the background using a 1" flat brush.  I did make sure that I cleaned the brush well between colours.
 


Once I was happy with the background,  I stuck down the 7" x 7" Burst stencil (again designed by Sheena Douglass) diagonally over the hippy characters, using low tack masking tape.  White acrylic paint applied with a small blending tool over the whole area, created a sunburst background.  I took care not to overload the blending foam and found that dragging the blending tool along the 'rays' from outer to inner was the easiest way to apply the paint.  Once dry, I removed the drawing gum by rubbing it off with my fingers.
 



The lyrics from the song were stamped using a mixture of upper and lower case letters from the Word Chain Alphabet stamp set by Claritystamp and Black Soot archival ink.  Even though I have a large selection of alphabet stamp sets to choose from, I always seem to come back to this one.  I love the quirkiness of the fonts particularly the 'R'.  Initially I spelt Aquarius incorrectly, but luckily there was space to add the first 'u' afterwards without being too obvious, thanks to the alphabet that I was using. 
Finally, I just had to colour the focal image, which I did using Distress markers and a water brush.




No comments: