Love: An Art Journal Page

The current prompt over on Try It On Tuesday is 'All Loved Up'. I thought this art journal page fitted the bill. 

I started by gessoing my kraft card page, drying it with a heat gun before adding a blend of distress paints in Scattered Straw, Fossilized Amber, Spiced Marmalade and Rusty Hinge; dabbed on and blended out with my fingers.  I use this method a great deal for creating the first layer of a background.
Next, I added a stamped layer with Archival ink for permanence.  I always choose colours which are close to the background paint colours as I like this layer to be textural and subtle.  I chose Orange Blossom and a little Venetian Orange archival ink and worked with the Mixed Media Journal stamp set.
A stencil from the Clarity Crafts New Design Club was perfect for this page, as I was intending to add 'heart' as an image rather than a word!  I blended a mixture of Worn Lipstick and Picked Raspberry distress paint and dabbed them through the stencil with a sponge.  I really liked the way that the textural stamping still showed a little through the paint.

I then added the words 'Fill your', 'with' and 'Love' using the Word Chain Alphabet, Versamark ink and detail black embossing powder.  I deliberately stamped the word love within the stencilled heart to reflect the concept of 'Fill your heart with love'.  
Having washed and dried the stencil, I laid it back over the image, brushed a little Red Geranium Archival ink over the outside edges and once the stencil was once again clean and dry dragged Clear texture paste from Cosmic Shimmer over the whole of the heart image.  As an afterthought, I sprinkled in some confetti in the form of tiny red, silver and pink hearts over the texture paste and pressed them in with my tweezers before leaving the paste to dry overnight.  Not all of the confetti stayed in place once the paste was dry, but I simply brushed away the loose pieces the next morning.
As a final touch, I sealed around the heart with distress collage medium and, once dry, added shading around the heart with Big Brush Markers in Dark Chrome Yellow, Terracotta, Sanguine and Caput Mortuum.  These only blend over a non-porous surface; hence the need to seal those areas with distress collage medium.  I also added a little more textural stamping with one of the Mixed Media Journal stamps in the bottom right hand corner of the page.