my heart is heavy - art journal page

I did this page last week after a rather tough weekend.......lots going on and all I can say is that I am so glad that I discovered art journaling.  It has really been my life-saver!  Having a place to creatively express my feelings has helped me in so many ways!  Even if I don't write anything down, my emotions still seem to come out and my brain is able to work through things as I rub paint around with my fingers and decide what layer to put on next.

 As you can tell, I was in a very sad and dreary place as I worked on this one....

 The heart is cut from a baby wipe that was used to wipe paint off of other projects. 

Lots of layers of acrylic paint, liquid acrylic paints dripping from the top of the page, stencils and a lace doily with color washes.....

Being a parent is the hardest job ever and there isn't anything worse than to know that your child is suffering.....thank goodness I have a place to let my own feelings out so that I can be there 100% for my child.  

I hope you all have some time to be creative this week.....the days are getting shorter, the air is getting that wonderful, crisp feeling to it and Autumn is almost here!

Take care and God Bless!

di

family - art journal page

Good morning and Happy Monday!  It's a beautiful morning here today, so I wanted to share with you a journal spread that I finished over the weekend.

The inspiration for this page is from a video of Dyan Reaveley that you can watch here.  There are so many amazing art journalers who are so generous to share their talent and time by making videos showing how they create their journal pages.  I think I learned just about everything that I know about art journaling by watching videos on You Tube and UStream!  So much inspiration can be found there!

 I really like the background technique Dyan shows and I was really excited to use my new Tim Holtz Artful Dwellings die.  I sprayed three colors of color washes on book paper and then cut them out on my Big Shot. 

 I stamped some leaves onto cardstock, painted them in with Peeled Paint Distress Stain and cut them out.  I placed them around the bottom of the houses to give them some dimension on the page.  It didn't look right to me seeing the houses just sitting on top of all of the leaves.  The Scrabble tile letters are from a sheet of scrapbooking paper.  I glued each letter onto a piece of card board and then cut them out, and rubbed the edges w/ brown ink.

A fortune from our dinner ne night that I've been holding onto for over a year was just what I needed for this page!

So that's it for now....I do have several more pages to share with you and I hope to do that throughout the week....

Take care and God Bless!
di

be still my heart - art journal page

I really wanted to use this baby wipe on a page that was covered with all sorts of colors.....this is what came out of that.  I'm not sure if I could ever do a page like this again. lol  This is so out of my box but I am really glad that I kept with it, played with my paints and didn't give up on it.  There were several times when I just wanted to cover it all up and start over.  But, instead of doing that, I added another layer of paint or color sprays and I'm quite tickled at how this one came to be.....

 The large heart was cut from a paint covered baby wipe that I used to clean paint off of other projects....

The best part....the awesome, black scroll cut out that my dear friend Lorri sent me!  It was the perfect finishing touch that it needed!

And it's good to be back!  A hacking scare shut me down for a few days, but hopefully all is well now.....some people have entirely too much free time.  That should be spending all of that energy creating....not trying to make other people's lives miserable. ;-)

Take care and God Bless,
di

true love - art journal page

Here's a page that I did a little while ago, but it's been sitting in my journal waiting for a title.  It finally came to me to other day, so I just used some alphabet stickers because there is so much collage on this one that the surface is quite bumpy and rough.  Not a good place to try to stamp or hand write a title!

Background was created by scraping pink, lime green and turquoise heavy body acrylic paints across page with an old credit card.  Each layer of paint was rubbed away a bit with a baby wipe before applying the next color.

 Lots of layers of what-nots that I found in my paper drawers....

 The flowered areas are pieces of a napkin that I pulled the extra layer of tissue from and just used the top, printed layer of the napkin.

Thank you so much to everyone who has been visiting me and for all of your wonderful comments about my pages!  I really do appreciate it so much!  I wish I could write more on here, but having my littles keeping me busy constantly keeps me from sitting here and spending lots of time on my posts! :-)

Take care and God Bless!

di

always show your true colors - art journal page

More playing over this past weekend.....this time with some liquid acrylics and heavy body acrylics and stencils and color sprays with stencils......

 The orange and turquoise blue paints are heavy body acrylic paints.....

 I used a pallet knife to scrape the heavy body acrylic paints across the top of a stencil.  This left lots of texture that you can feel when you rub your hand across the top of the page.

Take care and God Bless!

di

life is the art of drawing..... - art journal page

Well, I had lots of fun with this one.....playing with all of these colors really brightened my day.  I decided to play with my masking fluid and a stencil and this is what came from my experimenting!  The base colors are water colors and then I added layers of color wash with some stencils, along with using the masking fluid with the harlequin stencil.

After I painted the background, I used the harlequin stencil with the masking fluid.  After the fluid dried, I applied layers of water colors and then pink color spray and blue color spray with more stencils.

 When everything was all dry, I rubbed off the masking fluid to reveal the first layer of color underneath.....which is the yellow and light pink areas.

I'm so glad that I decided to experiment, because I had no idea if this would work!  I really love the effect and can't wait to try it again!

Take care and God Bless!
di