Well who would've guessed journalling was so much fun!

Recently I had a really good day out in London with Darcy, Emma and Alison looking round art shops,eating and walking round Soho and Bloomsbury with my trusty phone map.

One of the shops we visited was Cass Art in Islington (oooh its posh round there) and Darcy persuaded me that I needed to try the paper in these art journals from Seawhite. The killer statement was "they can really handle water"  So two ended up in my shopping bag along with many other things.

The statement was true and boy am I loving it just to splosh paint around and make backgrounds on the pages, some I finish off, some I don't.  At the moment its nice just to splosh and splash.

I haven't painted the cover yet as a) I thought I'd wait and do and the end as I knew I'd get paint all over it and b) I was too impatient to start sloshing paint around.

So this is a page I did finish using Emma's lovely new stamps and lots of the new PaperArtsy paints.

First I started off gessoing the page and then a layer of China.  I then did lots of flicking with watered down paints in Blueberry. Purple Rain and Chalk.

Over this I used the Lin Brown circles stencil in Smurf. Sanded this to help the circles blend into the background and on some of the larger circles used a toning coloured pencil.

Added some text stamping using  a PaperArtsy mini and Adirondack Light Cool Peri ink. Its very very subtle but adds another layer.

The next layer was Chartreuse paint in places added with a paint brush and them moved around with the brush lightly wetted with water.  As this paint is translucent it sort of sits on top of the page, but allows the China and everything else under the Chartreuse to come through. It looks a bit scary because you've added this greeny colour (well I got a bit oh no)the final layer of paint is watered down Chalk. Start with a little amount of paint (pea size) and add about a teaspoon of water.  Using a brush slosh it and dry.  Keep adding the ash layers until you feel happy that it has blended all the layers together.  I then added some more splats of the watered down Chalk

I knew I had a photo in my extensive photo collection of a battered street sign I saw in Peel in the Isle of Man on holiday last year and as this journal is about me embracing colour and especially bright colour I thought it was an apt sign to tell me to use my creative right side of the brain more.  The sign actually says no right turn but I covered that up with two of the stamps from EEG05.

I really wanted to use all the arrows on this plate to act as a background so I first added a light layer of Blue Oyster stamped an Ellen Vargo strip background in China and then stamped the arrows in black ink, rotating them around and masking of areas where I didn't want the stamps.  I then coloured in the arrows with pencils in toning colour's.  

I painted a scrap of card in China and then stamped the frame, added the photo and stuck the banner over the top.  The "journalling" is the who, what, where, when stamp and I just edged in white pen as well as the frame just to make them stand out. 

 I'm not too in love with my writing, its much better when I'm writing sentences etc. My Dad said he could never read my writing when I sent letters home from Uni, "looks lovely Joanna but I cant read it"  Mind you he had beautiful copperplate writing.  I used to love just looking at his letters and he could write really detailed descriptions on what my brothers were doing, the cats antics and the latest Archers saga.  

I'm about a quarter of the way through the journal, so there will be more pages to show using the delicious PaerArtsy paints - look out for more colour!

Hugs

Jo

xx