Ahhh Paris .......

Hello OTR friends Fiona here with you today to share my Ahhhh Paris Art Journal creation. Now, promise you'll be gentle as I am still very new at this art journalling thing! But I'm slowly getting the hang of it. From what I can gather, It's all about the layering and so, I've taken a step by step process of the layers I used to create this piece.

I used our current February Mood Palette for inspiration (love the colours)

Alwyas begin with a generous coating of gesso either white or clear. This will strengthen your page and give it "tooth" for the paints and other mediums to grip to. Next I added some die cuts and another layer of gesso over them.

  

Yes I know ...... I've covered up the pretty flowers but keeping scrolling down and you'll see I've wiped some off with a wet wipe!

See this is the thing that you have to trust when art journalling ..... sometimes things are not going to be "seen" as such but without them the piece seems wrong ...... so even thought these pretty flower die cuts are almost completely covered up, it adds to the final over all look.

Time to add some colour. I used 13@rts Ayeeda paint. I find them highly pigmented and the matte series of paints dry with the perfect finish. I chose Matte Pink and Matte Green for this project.

O.K. now the first layer of stamping. I use Stazon Ink because, well, it stays on! I've used a beautiful stamp from Kaszazz our sponsor this month. It's from the "River Bank" uncut set.

Then the next layer is some colour rub ons. I think these are from Kaisercraft. Make sure your background is super dry or the rubons won't stick.

Next layer ..... some more gesso. Now I've applied this using a dry brush technique which is exactly that, use a dry brush. no water but it can take some practice until you get it just right so an alternative is wack on the gesso and then, again with a wet wipe, remove some. Either way you'll get a very similar result. A softness over the whole page.

Last layer ..... more stamping. Here I've used a big Tim Holtz stamp (one of my all time favourites) and just stamped right over the top of everything. The stamp does say "Paris" on the bottom, so I did deliberately stamp that in the middle of the page. Other than that the rest of the stamping is random.

My last trick was to use a black marker to emphasise the word "Paris". I simply traced over the top of the stamp making it darker than the rest of the stamping on the page. I used a Kaszazz fine liner (5502) to do this. They have a set of 6 ranging from 0.05 to 1.00. I would highly recommend them to anyone wanting a set of markers for journalling. They are brilliant!

You can enter our challenge by adding your creation to the Link on the right hand side of our blog page. Directly link your projects page and add your name. Remember to include a link to our challenge page, a picture of our mood palette in your blog post to be eligible to win.

Good luck xx