GPP Street Team Crusade No 36 - Braving the Elements

I chuckled to myself writing that title as although it really refers to the recent cold weather, I do feel I braved, or even battled, with one of the elements we had to use in this challenge!

Michelle Ward's challenge was to gesso a journal page, paint it with acrylics, splash it with water and wipe (I forgot to wipe...ooops!) then stencil with homemade snowflakes before adding them to the page. 

It was the paint on the gesso I battled with!  I'm used to splooshing my paint around, dabbing and blending it, leaving some areas dark and making other areas lighter by watering down the paint.  Acrylic paint does not behave itself when it's on top of gesso....aaaarrrgh!

Having said that, I LOVE the result!!

I meant to take a couple of photos as I went along but I got a bit engrossed and forgot!!  I used Adirondack paint dabbers [stream, pool, eggplant, snowcap] and then highlighted areas with my new Inktense colouring pencils.  This was soooooooo relaxing, and the gesso base gives a great 'tooth' for the pencil. 

The final task was to add some journalling, which I did, but may paint over as I'm not happy with it.  I preferred the page without it and imagine it would look better with white gel pen handwriting across areas.  I was trying not to write in and out of the snowflakes, don't know why, just thought I ought to try something different!!

This is my first time at entering this challenge, although I've often looked and drooled over entries.  If you look at my snowflakes, they have little hearts in there, an idea I stole from Julie Prichard!  I've always put straight cuts into homemade snowflakes before!!

Going to leave you with a couple of images of the pages I did yesterday to demonstrate how I layer acrylic paint onto my journal page, and later add stamping and images.  It's still a page in progress.

The page on the right, below, was one from a previous demo which I added to with a baby wipe and green true colours paint to co-ordinate a little better with the page on the left.

stunning atc

This ATC came in the post yesterday whilst I was out and I just opened it. Isn't it stunning? It's from Michele Readitt. I just love it.



Last night I signed up for Julie Prichard's art journalling class starting very, very soon! I discovered Julie's blog after she finished doing 'Layer Love' which looked like my kind of class so I was soooooooo pleased when I saw she was doing another art journaling workshop. I can't wait! We're making journals first, then painting, collaging etc. If you've never done an online workshop they are great. You get to work with tutors you'd never normally be able to take a class from, you get instruction that you can watch over and over if you need to, and you meet people and see great work from others and receive feedback on your own.