Butterflies

After a really productive August, September just went downhill. It took me nearly half the month just to finish a handful of outstanding blog posts, never mind actually starting any new projects.

And it’s not even creative block or lost mojo. I have plenty of ideas for things I want to make and experiments to try.

It’s my focus I’ve lost. I simply couldn’t get started on anything. It’s like, if I stop and think about anything, that’s it, no chance I’ll do it. The only thing I made in the first ten days was a hand-carved stamp and that only happened because I was doing a bit of tidying, came across the piece of rubber, remembered I was going to see if it would carve reasonably, grabbed the lino cutter and started work on it. And then I got over-enthusiastic on the paper I’d been testing it on and ended up making something that I thought would work nicely as a background for an art journal page.

So that’s what I did with it. After another ten days of doing absolutely nothing crafty, I decided that I just had to bite the bullet and do something. A bit more tidying up to make some space revealed my art journal and so I set up my phone to take some process photos for a change — even though I had no plan in mind — and grabbed some supplies. And this is what I did…

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A rough layout. It’s all well and good having no plan, but it does help to arrange a few scraps to give you a starting point.

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Glue down the base layer. And then add a few extra bits to make it more interesting. And yes, the central piece of music paper is torn: after careful planning and even marking where it should be on the page, I immediately glued it in completely the wrong place and by the time I realised why it didn’t look right, it only just pulled back off again. But this is a mixed media collage and it didn’t matter in the slightest — it’s just a bit more texture.

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And even it out with a bit of gesso. An uneven layer of white gesso helps to bring the background together as a whole and can be used to knock back elements that are too bright.

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Add some pink Infusions pigment powder. The Infusions powders have walnut stain in them so you get a nice brown undertone to the colour.

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And some black Brusho. I wanted to intensify the darkness at the bottom of the page and the Brusho does that nicely without completely blacking everything out.

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Stencil some leaves with texture paste. I did check the position of the butterflies before doing this to makes sure I was going to leave enough space for them and to try to create a frame for them.

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And add some more colour. Dylusions sprays for a bit of variety, though I used a paintbrush to apply them rather than spraying directly onto the page; it’s quite a small pad and I wanted more control.

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Glue down the butterflies. More gel medium, very carefully applied as the wetness of the medium was enough to start reactivating some of the colour!

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Outline the butterflies and leaves. The Stabilo gives a nice solid black when you go over it with a damp brush. The charcoal pencil smudges beautifully. The combination of the two creates a really nice shadowed outline. The top frond got a white outline in keeping with the dark to light flow on the page. I remembered that I needed to give the butterflies their antennae back, so I did it before I forgot again.

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And finally, some black and white gesso splatters. Again, emphasising the dark to light split on the page, with white splatters at the top and black at the bottom. I thought about adding a word or three to this page but decided that I liked it too much as it was to do any more to it.

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Supplies:

• Prep & Stick:
  Finnabair – soft matte gel
• Texture:
  Finnabair – paper texture paste
• Colour:
  Dylusions ink spray – crushed grape, bubblegum pink, ground coffee
  Paperartsy infusions – are you cerise
  Brusho – black
  Liquitex professional white gesso
  Ranger – black gesso
• Pens & Pencils:
  Stabilo All – black, white
  Royal Langnickel – soft charcoal pencil
  Sakura glaze pen –  black
• Stencils:
  Craftstar – fern frond
• Paper & Fabric:
  Strathmore mixed media pad 5.5″ × 8.5″
  Butterflies and music paper are from the collage pack that came with the Just Begin workshop I did recently

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