Inspire

Another art journal page — I could get used to making these! It’s nice to have a single starting point, a few ideas, and no finished image in mind and then just see where the page takes you.

This one started with a bit of spare gesso left over from prepping another experiment: I didn’t want to waste it so I mixed in a bit of Distress stain for colour and covered a page in my mixed media pad.

I’d seen a video where someone used water to lift colour from gesso coloured with Distress and wanted to see how well it worked. It wasn’t a huge success for this project, you could see the difference, but the colours were too light for the effect to survive through the addition of any more layers.

But I had a starting point.

Next, I reached for my trusty stencils and added Distress oxide to the page. I finally managed to pick up some Tim Holtz stencil brushes so I tested them out on this — neither of the stencils I used was particularly delicate, which is where blending tools can cause problems, but I was impressed with how easy it was to fade the colour out from a strong centre point. I’ll have to do some more testing to update my blending tests post from last year.

Then some stamping. I reached for my unused stamps pile and added the postal textures and the large fractured glass image.

And now it was all looking a bit too vivid, when my vague aim for this one was to be more subtle with the colours, especially after the bright journal page I did last time. So, I got out the gesso and selectively toned it down.

I did add some spatters with the Distress stain, but they almost faded away. I ended up adding some more splatters at the end with Distress paint instead.

Once I was happy with the background I could add the focal pieces, starting with the “inspire” definition. Next, I stamped the ravens and outlined them in white. I wanted to differentiate between the main raven and the others, so I used a black Stabilo All pencil and a wet brush to intensify the black.

For the border, I smeared on some white gesso and then a thinner edge of black pencil to finish it off.

The last thing I did was to make it more journal-y by adding an extra-scrawly version of my horrible handwriting to it:

“inspiration is everywhere, be ready for the spark that catches your imagination”

Challenges:

• Country View Crafts – June 2018 – written word

Supplies:

• Prep & Stick:
  Liquitex white gesso
• Stamps:
  Tim Holtz – ravens
  Blue Fern Studios – postal textures
  Visible Image – how fragile
  Visible Image – imagine, dream, inspire
• Colour:
  Distress stain – wild honey, cracked pistachio
  Distress oxide – wild honey, cracked pistachio, picked raspberry
  Distress paint – mustard seed, picked raspberry
• Inks:
  Versafine – onyx black
  Versafine – smokey gray
  Hero Arts shadow ink – red royal
  Ranger archival – sepia
• Pens & Pencils:
  Stabilo All pencil – black
  Faber-Castell PITT artist pen – white