Thursday 15 June 2017

Art Journal Prompts Week 9: Material

I must admit, that having finally caught up with all of the previous Art Journal Prompts, this was the first prompt that I saw when I joined the group, and the one which I put off working on the longest.  Most of the examples that I saw in the album involved using actual material, and I really couldn't come up with any ideas at the time.  During the subsequent weeks, I have learnt to think outside the box, and quite often search for quotes involving the prompt, to give me a starting point for a page.  As I was determined not to put this page off for any longer,  I found the quote which I eventually used and the entire page fell into place!  This is now probably one of my favourite pages of the 23 that I have completed so far.


As the quote involved printed material, I decided to use book pages, map fragments and sections of the Terminology Tissue Wrap by Tim Holtz (now discontinued) to create an interesting background.  I tore random shapes and sizes from all three and arranged them over the whole page, gluing and sealing each piece in turn with distress collage medium.  Once completely dry, a light coat of white gesso was painted over the whole thing. 
Next came a coat of distress paints in Old Paper and Tea Dye to mimic the look of ancient paper (again in keeping with the quote).  The paints were dabbed onto the page and blended out with my fingers until I was happy with the balance.
 I had a look through my stamps and dies and decided to use the Quill and Ink from the Marianne die set, the Laptop die (also by Marianne) and two different stamps of stacks of books by Sheena Douglass; the larger stack is from the stamp set called Knowledge and the smaller stack from the Alchemy collection set called Learn to See.  This second stamp has a matching die called The Knowledge (confusingly enough), but the larger book stack had to be fussy cut once stamped.  All the dies/stamped images use Sheena's stamping card as a base and the ink used for stamping is Jet Black Archival ink.  All the items except the laptop were glued onto the page and sealed with distress collage medium to provide a non-porous surface.
The next job was to colour the images.  For the laptop, I used Mediterranean Blue and Graphite Metallic Gilding Polish by Cosmic Shimmer and I heat embossed the 'loading' image onto the screen using detail silver Cosmic Shimmer powder and Versamark ink.  All the other images were coloured with my Faber-Castell Big Brush markers blended with cotton buds (Q Tips) and my fingers; hence the need for a non-porous (dry) surface.  I also added some shading around all the images (including the laptop, which was added once all the colouring was done).  I love this method of adding colour and use it quite often on my journal pages.
Finally, I stamped the prompt word, 'material', using the Claritystamp Word Chain Alphabet in Versamark ink, and heat embossed it with detail black embossing powder.  The last step was to add the first part of the quote printed out on my Dymo Letratag in the medium font.





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