Using What You Have

Hello everyone. Can you believe it's almost the end of September!

I have a little share for you today. An art journal page I created using some inexpensive products. I find more and more now days the pressure to spend big bucks on products to achieve awesome art journalling or scrapping results when in actual fact you can achieve the same outcome with less expensive items.

Our lovely blog owner Amanda, sent me some gorgeous little paints a little while back and asked me to see what I could create with them. 

You can find Amanda's goodies HERE

These are little pots of acrylic paint with a satin finish that are affordable and easy to use. They are water based and so react with water really well making them ideal for creating colour on your layouts as a background or adding colour to an art journal page similar to what I have done.

I started the journal page by covering the pages in white gesso. Then I went crazy with some stamping. I used Jet Black Stazon Ink because I wanted the stamping to stand out and I wanted it to be water resistant. This is important because I'll be adding lots of water and paint over the top.

I then added some "Rug gripper". It's a mesh type of tape that is sticky both sides. It gives some great texture to your page as well as acting as a sort of sticky tape for the paper I wanted to put over the top.

Next step was to glue on strips of scrap patterned paper. I chose to go with black and white prints so they wouldn't detract from the colours I would be adding over the top.

After spraying some water over the page, I added the coloured paints randomly over the pieces of patterned paper. I just kept adding paint and water until the colours combined a little and then let it dry.

After it was completely dry, I smudged some white gesso over the top in some places. This was to help the colours and papers blend together. It creates a soft appearance. If you prefer the clean edge look you could skip this part.

I splattered some black and white watered down paint over the whole area and again waited for it to dry. Right at the end, once the whole page was dry, I drew some lines of definition around the patterned paper and traced over some elements of the stamping with a black fine tip pen. 

I wanted to add some depth to the page and the addition of the black drawing achieved this perfectly. Tracing over stamping is so easy especially if you're like me and couldn't draw anything to save yourself! All the hard work is done for you :)

This was a very quick and easy journal page to create and I would love to see you guys give it a go. I think I might even use this techniques to create a layout background for my scrapbooking too!

Cheers for now xx

Fiona