Thursday 1 February 2018

An Art Journal OOPS!

This page was created for the January monthly challenge over on Mixed Media Art Journey.  It was finished in January, even if I'm not sharing the process until the start of February lol.  Six word dice are thrown each month and the resulting six prompts have to be included in any order.  For January the prompts were: 'Create a page'; 'Use something recycled'; 'Add sparkle'; 'Use blue'; 'Add washi tape' and 'Favourite saying'.
I worked on a piece of 10" x 7" mixed media card to fit in my journal and decided to work in a portrait format (create page).  I started by adding pieces of book text recycled from an old German-English bilingual dictionary (use something recycled).
For the next step I used blue and added sparkle at the same time.  Spectrum Noir sparkle pens in Starry Sky and Frozen Lake were added directly to the page and blended with a large water brush.  You can see where the matte medium had been used over the dictionary text as those areas appear lighter creating a patchy effect.
Once dry, I added my home made washi tape (created by stamping layers of Stamper's Anonymous/ Tim Holtz stamps onto masking tape, using different colours of Archival inks) along the bottom of the page.  (To see more details of the process you can see further examples of the technique HERE and HERE).

I then glued an image, fussy cut from a magazine (more recycling), onto the page.  This is where the OOPS occurred (or as Carolyn Dube calls them, an Outstanding Opportunity Presenting Suddenly).  I should have sealed the whole page with clear gesso to prevent the water based sparkle pen from being smeared over the image.  Despite being careful, smears of blue appeared on the front of the image while it was being sealed onto the page with Distress Collage medium.  I decided to turn this into a feature (given the quote I was intending to use).  Once dry, I added more blue to the face, arms and legs with my Faber-Castell Big Brush markers, blending out the colour with my fingers.  I also went round the whole image with a black Sakura micron pen.
Finally, I stamped the word 'Friend' in Versamark ink and heat embossing in detail white embossing powder, using the Claritystamp Word Chain Alphabet. The rest of the quote was printed in sections using my Dymo Letratag, trimmed and added to the page.  Once again a black Sakura micron pen was used to edge the letters and the quote blocks.
Despite the mess up in the middle of creating the page, I like the finished piece; I am learning to make the most of my mistakes this year when journaling, rather than throwing pieces away as soon as anything goes wrong.

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