Contrast and Layers: PaperArtsy Project

Hi everyone, hope you are all enjoying some sunshine wherever you are! A mixed day here of sun and rain but I've been in my happy place: art journaling. My post tonight is a link up with the PaperArtsy blog: Here where I created an art journal page exploring the theme of contrasting dark and light layers. I loved completing this despite a lot of time spent cutting out a lot of Kim Dellow's gorgeous stamp images from her PaperArtsy Eclectica set: ELD06! A fabulous set for art journaling. I'm in love with the Daisy flower on this set.

I started by making the 'flowers' - I'm not sure that they are all flowers as they are certainly not all a typical flowers shape. They are gorgeously 'doodly' which is why I love them! I decided to use the gelli plate and a variety of substrates to produce dark and light contrasts within the 'flowers'. This also   avoided merely colouring in the images. The gelli plate achieves this more quickly and easily than I can by colouring and shading! I use a lot of colours when I'm art journaling and more so when I use the gelli plate. The great thing about PaperArtsy Frescos is - there's a lot of them! Such a variety of different tones and hues. I planned to use blues and greens and those colours either side of these on the colour wheel, thus only using analogous colours, so for the flowers I opted to use the lighter end of these colours to contrast with a much deeper, more bluesy background.

 

These are the ones I selected from the many I made! I love these monoprints results so much that I find it hard to stop. Each one is such a marvellous surprise. I used deli paper, PaperArtsy Tissue 

Stock, some pearlescent heavy weight papers I had in my stash and PaperArtsy 240gms SmootHy 

card. The ones I selected were a mixture of these. All from these colours: n

Delicious aren't they? As you can see, I have kept to the lighter turquoises/teals and yellows for the stamped images. This still allows me to produce dark and light contrasts within the 'flowers' but will also contrast with the much darker blue/violet background I had planned to place them on.

Before stamping and cutting the images out, I first stamped randomly over the monoprints, again to incorporate some dark and light contrasts within the 'flowers'. Now to make the background! 

I selected some darker tones but still within this colour family. To get the first couple of layers down quickly, and to blend them smoothly, I tend to use a baby wipe! 

My technique is usually the same for all my backgrounds: I start with selecting opaque colours for a first layer then incorporate more transparent colours over the top, leaving dark and light areas as I go. I then use various stencils to the next layers and alternate dark colours over light and light colours over dark. I carry on adding more and more paint through various stencils until I'm happy with the result. 

I've used a mix of PaperArtsy and Crafters Workshop stencils here. I do love those little flower stencils by Emma Godfrey: PM 008/ 02. I also love the complementary stencil set to Kim Dellow's stamp set: PS048

I have described how I used one of Kim Dellow's stencils and turned it into a stamp over on the PA blog. I used a Distress Oxide to do this. It's the lime coloured leaf on top of this background. This was added to echo the yellow/greens in the stamped images. Now it was just a case of arranging the 'flowers' across the background. Of course, a lot of stamping, doodling and further playing has also happened to this background! 

Here's a close up...

I hope you like my art journal spread and feel I've achieved what I set out to do i.e. Produce a contras

t of dark and light layers. Sadly, this is the final day of the current PA theme, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't have a play with this idea in your own art journals. Thankyou for stopping by, I would love to read your opinion as to whether you think I achieved it! Until next time! 

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