step by step art journal page

I thought it might be fun to take step by step photos of the journal page and share them here.

I've been thinking about doing a page with leaves on for a while now and was recently given a set of leaf stamps.

I decided it might be fun to use these, although they don't lend themselves to an autumn theme, which might have been fun.  I love the colours at this time of year.

First step was to tidy my desk, then I stamped up the leaves to see how they stamped and what they looked like inked up...

I've always loved both ferns and ivy, and have plenty of both in my garden, but decided that today I'd go with the ivy leaves as a theme for my page.

I sprayed a selection of green inks...

...then pressed a stencil down onto the wet ink.  This gave some subtle texture to the page and I thought it might be nice to stamp some text over the stencil in some areas.

I could only find one green dye ink pad, so made a mental note to add a dark green to my shopping basket next time I'm buying craft supplies.  I stamped the text on scrap paper to see the ink was the right shade and decided to go with it.

I like using unmounted rubber stamps to apply patches of pattern to a page - you can curve them slightly to add randomly shaped areas of texture.

After lifting off the stencil there was quite a bit of ink left on it so I turned it over and used a baby wipe to wipe the ink back onto the page, dabbing small areas too.

Et voila!  I liked that, but now what?

Time to pause, dunk my biscuit in my tea and think about how I'd add the leaves to my page.

I'd wiped some ink from my stencil onto the scrap paper I'd stamped on earlier so decided to cut out the ivy leaf....

... and I was able to make some more green paper up quickly by wiping over the oversprayed ink with a wet baby wipe.

The leaves looked good but needed something more so ...

... I stamped some directly onto the page.  Then came a bit of an 'eeek' moment, when I didn't like how the leaves were sitting together.

A few deep breathes later and I decided they looked ok and they just needed some depth.

A quick look amongst my newly tidied pens etc and I easily put my hands on a charcoal pencil and added some shading under the leaves.

What I couldn't lay my hands on was my blending tool, but a cotton bud did the trick just as well, smudging the charcoal to create shadows.

I fancied adding some curly tendrils but didn't want to spoil the page so decided to blot away some ink through a stencil to see if I liked the design.  I was tempted to draw through the stencil with a green pen.

I did like it, but changed my mind about the pen.  I rarely clean my stencils which means I often add unintentional colours to my pages... and today was no different.  I loved the browny orange hints and continued deliberately adding them around the page.

Happy journaling everyone!!