Art Journal Cover by Karen

For today's post I thought it was time I decorated the cover of my art journal. What to do if you want some texture but without things that will catch and tear? Tissue paper and different texture pastes was my answer.

Manila paper tends to suck the colour out of everything and I wanted to have a bit of white space so I started with a layer of white gesso, feathered out so there were no hard lines. Then I added a bit of light background stamping and stamped my title on to tissue paper.

I painted the back of the tissue paper white so that it would stand out against a coloured background...

and I added Turquoise acrylic paint to the cover, again feathering out to avoid hard edges.

For a pop of contrast and some texture, I mixed Magenta paint in to transparent relief paste (now called Design-It) and stenciled this over the other colours.

To take the title stand out more, I added a light touch of Cadium Yellow and used gel medium to stick down the tissue paper adding a coat under and over to be sure it was well adhered. I added a third lot of stenciling too.

Mixing Yellow and Scarlet paint for a bright orange, I added more stenciling and doodled round the stars and circles with black and white pens. I used Black Acrylic Paint to sponge round the edges of the cover.

For more texture and contrast, I stenciled Black Expand-IT paste on to the cover. I also added lines with the edge of a paint knife to the 'Art' letters, and heated the Expand-IT to puff it up for some volume.

I am sure I will continue to doodle or add to this over time but, for now, it makes me happy that my journal has a decorated cover in some of my favourite bright colours. It gives a hint of what is inside. More of that another day!

Bye for now
Karen
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Soft Form Relief Paste	EXpandit 3D expanding medium	StazOn Jet Black	Plastic Painting Knives	Golden Matt medium
white gesso	Heat Gun	Golden haired nylon brushes	Eco Acrylic Paint

Art Journal pages by Karen

Art journaling is used by many people as a form of therapy, letting emotions out on to the page which can then be hidden by the art layers. I don't often do this but today I thought I would show this process because it does help to sometimes get feelings out of your head and on to the page.

Without any planning as to how the page would look when finished, I made a process video:

I scribbled some thoughts in the journal and then covered the pages with some gesso and started my mark-making, adding colour with Colourcraft acrylic inks. These translucent inks are permanent once dry so they can be layered without creating mud and have a lovely soft effect.

The colours were softened further in places with white ColourCraft Eco Acrylic Paint and the stencil was used with black.

 Further contrast and texture was added with Design-It paste in Glossy White.

Finally, I used a white pen to add highlighting to some shapes and the text.

Thanks for stopping by today. Do you do art journalling? I hope you like this spread and the lovely acrylic ink colours.
Karen

Soft Form Relief Paste	Clear Spray Bottle	Plastic Painting Knives	Eco Acrylic Paint	white gesso
Heat Gun	Golden haired nylon brushes

Art Journaling- Five Layers with Brusho and DesignIT paste

I've been a huge fan of art journals for quite some time-but have gotten a bit stuck on how to get started!
As I was looking at and reading about different pages, I saw someone mentioning doing 'five different layers' so I took my inspiration from that.
I had constructed a junk journal a couple of weeks ago- basically cutting up paper bags from different shops, using different off cuts of papers from other projects, as well as some patterned note pads I had. I put a bunch of these together using an easy binding which allows me to remove and re-add pages for ease of working on them.

I selected a two page spread and began to layer.

Layer one- glue on a piece of old wrapping paper.

Layer two- DesignIt pastes in gold and bronze through a large flower stencil.

Layer three- Sprinkle and spray Brushos in Terracotta, Bright Red, Yellow and Black.

Layer four- White gesso sparsely spread through a small flower stencil.

Layer five- text printed, cut out and glued.

And that's that! I really easy and effective way to break into art journaling

Soft Form Relief Paste

white gesso

Brusho 24 Colour Boxed Set