Journal Page Step by Step

Working in my Mega Journal.  The left side was already painted with acrylic paints from when I prepared the journal.

Starting with a cheap, hard bristled brush because I'm going to play with a stencil.

This is a stencil that I cut a long time ago out of watercolor paper.  For this step, I used the hard bristle brush to pounce on some pink glossy craft paint -- just in the middle.  The glossy part isn't what's important, but I know from using this paint before that it's more transparent than opaque which is what I was going for.

Before I removed the stencil, I sprayed a big spray of Dylusions Bubblegum Pink ink spray.

Then I used the remnant from punching out my daughter's Memory game cards as a stencil.

Using the same brush that I used for the pink before, I pounced on some pink acrylic and orange.  I don't wash my brush in between most steps.  Just a side note about color selection- I usually stick with three or four colors next to each other on the color wheel.  That way, I don't get a muddy color when the colors mix together -- just fun blends!

The page was screaming for some yellow, so I used the same brush (probably blotted off on a paper towel) and added a lemon yellow craft paint around and on the stenciled squares and the circle starburst stencil.  (Why was it screaming?  I wasn't super happy with the squares competing with the starburst, so something needed to make them calm down a bit.  The yellow seemed to do the trick.)

Ok, I did wash my brush before I did this step.  I grabbed some white gesso (which I like because it dries quickly, isn't too opaque, and it dries with a flat/matte finish) and painted a circle.  I also added some white between some of the rays and in the middle.

I had a thought that the circle might become a flower, so I stenciled on two flower centers using pink craft paint and the same starburst stencil.

Then I grabbed a flat brush (again, a cheap, hard bristle brush)...

And I added some more white in and around those flowers using gesso.  On a different day, I may have just stopped here and moved to a different page.  I kind of liked it just like this, but that seemed like a boring demo.  I hadn't really messed up anything yet (at least in my mind), and I wanted to keep playing.

So, I added some lettering using a small #6 round brush and some white gesso.  The ink spray does some interesting things when you paint over it which I'll have to explore another day.  (A note about Dylusions ink sprays - they are water soluble, so they will smudge when you use them over a painted surface (like my page on the left was painted) and then paint over them.  If you put them on an absorbent paper (like my page on the right where there was just paper), they don't budge much.) 

And I kept going with some thin Sharpie markers and Prismacolor colored pencils in purple and magenta.

So here's where I confess that there's part of the page that I'm not happy with.  For whatever reason, I decided to just write the word "discover".  It made it onto the end product as you will see, but I will probably revise this by painting over it with a stripe of gesso and do some different lettering.

I added a paper arrow on the left, and after that, I got a little crazy.  I added a darker pink stripe around the big circle, then I made some white circles with gesso over all of my circles.  After that dried a bit, I took a wet wipe and started smudging parts of the page -- mostly to soften up the darker pink stripe.  You might be able to see where I made a big circular sweep over the big circle.



Ok, so now I have some smudgy messes.  let's clean up a bit.  I added some paper circles to the middle of my small flowers.  The orange striped center was a little too white, so I used a Portfolio water soluble oil pastel followed by some water to tint it a little orange. I also used the starburst stencil and Dylusions Orange ink spray to add some subtle orange rays on the bottom left.  To do that, I just sprayed the ink, then smudged it with a paper towel while the stencil was still in place. 

And to finish up (for now), I used a Stabilio black pencil to  do some outlining and add details.  I also added white gesso accents and painted over the "dream" letters again so they would stand out a little more.  And finally, I added some cut out scrapbooking paper circles for the middles of the circles.

That's it!  Don't hesitate to let me know if you have questions.  Have a great weekend!