TGF is Blushing again along with FBW!

Hey everyone. It’s Wednesday so that means it’s time for Flutterby Wednesday AND I have a special post for the Greeting Farm and I’ve combined the two. Our challenge at FBW is open this week and we have a fabulous sponsor, Through the Craftroom Door! I will be making a project with their stamps later this week but today I’m concentrating on The Greeting Farm‘s Blush Society stamps and showing a couple of ways to use these gorgeous versatile stamps that maybe you hadn’t considered.

This is a page in my art journal. I’ve posted a few other pages but this is my most recent one. I started this page about a month ago when I was just preparing a bunch of pages with gesso and dictionary after school one day because I wasn’t going to have the ‘studio’ setup that I have at school over the summer. I sprayed the empty pages with liquid Distress Ink in Walnut Stain and Faded Denim. When that was dry I brushed over it with Liquitex Basics Gesso. (Gesso is a white paint base for oil/acrylic painting… it typically is a heavier body than most paint and has a texture to it to help give acrylic paints and oils paints something to stick to and it’s almost always an acrylic paint.) The gesso mixed a little bit with the distress inks and tinted a little pit through out the page.

This is a shot of the page before I added the letters, the butterfly wings and the girls. If you mouse over the picture I’ve labeled everything so you can see what’s what. I added the green steel floor pattern by sponging through a painting mask with Peeled Paint Distress Ink. Next I stamped around the page with the Blush Hello stamp in Tuxedo Black ink. I used some clear embossing powder in random places around the page and heat embossed and dried the ink. Then I stamped the Blush Hearts around the page, again in Tuxedo Black, again heat setting them. Next I added some iridescent medium around the page with my fingers to give it some sparkle. Then I outlined the hearts with a Gelly Roll Souffle pen in white.

I stamped the words with Timber Brown Stazon ink (this is really the ink you want to use on your art journal pages that are gessoed, dye and pigment ink just don’t dry without heat when they can’t be absorbed). After stamping the letters I outlined them with black and white charcoal to make a slightly embossed look.

Next I stamped the wings from the Spotlight Kit from TGF around the outside of the page in white pigment ink (not my best idea ever… next time I’ll use a white acrylic paint dauber). I glued the girls down on that. They were first stamped on white linen cs and colored with Copics and cut out.

Lastly I outlined the girls with black charcoal that was smeared with a q-tip. That’s it!

This project did take a few hours BUT it was so much fun. I can’t WAIT to start another one! And I hope this helped to show some of the ways you can use the supplies you already have to make cards, canvases and journal pages with a mixed media flare! If you are looking for more information on art journaling there are a couple of wonderful youtube artists who have fantastic videos. My favorite is Artful Evidence (you’ll see her influence in my page today).  Here she is on YouTube.

Have a great Wednesday!!