Happy Accident Art Journal Page

This is one of my favourite art journal pages from 2017.  I love this colour combination and the happy accident of discovering a sunset on the mop up sheet is a type of background that I use a lot.

The mop up sheet was covered with Carved Pumpkin, Dried Marigold, Fossilized Amber, Mustard Seed, Worn Lipstick and Picked Raspberry distress ink.  I cut a piece of stamping card to 19.5cm x 18.5cm to fit in my journal and tried various sections of the mop up sheet over the top until I found a section that I particularly liked.  I then glued and sealed the mop up sheet to the base card using Distress Collage Medium, dried it off and trimmed all four sides.
The section that I chose reminded me of a sunset, so I cut a circle from a piece of card the same diameter as the 'sun' on the mop up sheet to use as a mask.  The outer piece covered the rest of the page while I added Fossilized Amber and Mustard Seed distress ink to the sun with Claritystamp stencil brushes.  I then masked off the sun to add Worn Lipstick and Picked Raspberry ink to the sky.  By this time I had decided on my quote 'Red sky at night; shepherds' delight...'
I wanted to add further texture using stamping in Archival ink and made further use of the outer section of the sun mask to add the Marble stamp designed by Tim Holtz for Stampers Anonymous in both Chrome Yellow and Venetian Orange, cleaning and turning the stamp between impressions.  Having masked off the sun, I then used the two stamps from the Ledger Script set in Rose Madder ink across the sky.  For the hills, I tore some copy paper to use as masks and used a range of stamps from the Documented, Slight Alterations, Slate & Stone, Ledger Script and Drips and Dirt stamp sets using first Venetian Orange and then Monarch Orange in places.

For the focal point, I chose the Butterfly Tree stamp by Claritystamp.  I used my Misti for this step, as I knew that I would need several goes to get a solid impression over the texture of the mop up page.  I used Coffee Archival ink and stamped the image three times altogether.  I also used the matching stencil to add four further butterflies over the sun in the same ink. To ground the tree, I used the ink which remained on my smoothie to blend across the bottom of the page and around the remaining sides.  It only remained to print out the quote using my Dymo Letratag and add it to the page.