Grateful Art Journal pages

Here is my completed art journal page :)
If you remember Caroline and I came up with a challenge to each other to do an art journal page.
We were both intimidated by all the products and techniques out there, that we both were hesitant to start on our own…I had some of my art journal products for a couple of years.
As you can tell, I am not a jump right in there type of person, teehee.

Our theme was Grateful with Autumn colours.
I knew I was going to do my family, and I love rich, deep autumn colours…but how to go about putting them together.

I started by adding some tissue paper to the pages.
The tissue paper bubbled a bit as it was drying, so I added another coat of matt medium to the top of the tissue paper, hoping it would smooth out the tissue..it didn't.

I then added some acrylic paint.
The colour was a deep burgundy colour, but because of the matt medium I added to the page, the paint seemed to lighten in colour.
So instead of it being a deep burgundy, it seemed to take on a deep pinky colour.

I added some orange and browns to the pages, working out to the edges.
But I was mad at myself for forgetting to blend the paints with a baby wipe or wet cloth as I went :(
I did not like the look of the out come at all!!
I was going to just gesso over the whole page, but thought….just work with it.

So I took a baby wipe and rubbed the heck out of the page.
Of course I knew that the paint wouldn't blend as I had painted it days before, and it was totally dry.
But what it did do was take off some of the paint.
I kind of liked the out come :)
In some spots, I rubbed it to the tissue and no paint was visible.
So I added some tea dye distress stain to the whole page to blend throughout.
Background done…time to add my elements :)

I wanted to use a photo of my family.
See scrapbooker at heart, teehee.
I printed out my photo and adhered it to the corner of my page.
I also wanted to play with some molding paste. You can use dry wall compound for this as well.
At this point I don't know what I was thinking, because what I was planning to do would never work out with how I did it, lol.
I wanted my photo to blend in with the background, and have hearts around it.
I didn't work out as planned the first time around…but that is how it goes sometimes.

To get the photo to blend in more with the background, I just smeared the hearts that I made with the stencil.
I then added some spray mist with a make up sponge.
But I still wanted hearts around our photo.
Grabbed the stencil again after the molding paste was dry and added some spray.

I also drew around the hearts as when I sprayed them, they bled a bit on the paste.
It was at this point that I forgot to keep taking photos…but I will have a video to the process at the end of my post.

You all know I love to journal, so I had to add a bit of that to my page as well.
I printed the words up on my computer on regular copy paper.
Then I cut them into strips and added 3 different distress ink colours to the papers so they would blend nicely with the background.
I forgot the "the" on the last line, so I had to re-do the last strip when the page was all completed.

This is the second page.
When I first started these pages, this page was going to hold the journaling…but I wanted to add my leaves.
I didn't use my "real" leaves that I shared in a earlier post as they didn't want to stick to the page, but they stuck to my fingers, lol.
I like the colour of these leaves. I added some shading to them as well.

Wow, this was a long post.
I hope you stuck with me through it all, lol.

Oh look, I'm not done…
I have a video to share with you on how I put these pages together in more detail :)
If you would rather watch it on my YouTube channel just click on the link "Tracy's Treasures24"

I would like to say thank you to Caroline for joining me in this challenge into art journaling, and I am looking forward to our next challenge :)
If you would like to see Carolines take on our challenge, just click on the link "Grateful Challenge"

I hope you all had a very Creative Day
I am going to spend the rest of mine eating munchies and drinking a nice glass of ice-cold Coke…and most importantly, watching a marathon of the Walking Dead :)

Tracy :)