This is one of those things that I wish I would have thought of a lot sooner! In my last blog post I shared about getting a lot of inspiration from YouTube and Etsy digitals. Well, last week I put “Bright Digitals” into my Etsy search and found a shop that sold some beautiful digital copies of her art. Bingo, into the cart!

Then, while running errands the other day (I get my best ideas while driving), it occurred to me that I might be able to do the same thing with some of my painted pages.

Before.

These are some of the backgrounds that I had painted for pages in my art journals. I had muted down the color a bit with tinted watered down gesso because they were super bright.

But I wanted “Super Bright” pages to work with in my art journals. Hmmmm…

After!

I scanned them into my computer as a .jpeg so my photo editing app would accept them, and turned up the dials. There were so many options on how to manipulate the color, I was in heaven!

Now, I know that these are a little blurry from all the playing around I did on my computer, but this is just a start. Besides, these are to tear up or use as backgrounds so no worries. Also, I have quite a few more painted background pages to work with that I can paint over, stencil, and do all kinds of colorful decorating on before scanning.

Where it stared.

That little pink paper scrap in the background is from a page I painted a while back. I loved how it came out by combining it with digitals and a few of my own “art scraps”, but I was using up a favorite painted page! Now, I’m all about downsizing and using things up, but if you scan it before using it up, then it’s no longer taking up space, and you know where to find it. Which is a game changer in my world, you have no idea how much time I spend looking for things…but that’s another story.

Matching up colors.

I’m in spring mode right now, so I wanted to use a more muted art paper in the background, all I had to do is tone the color down a bit before printing. If there is a particular image or focal point that you want to match, it’s easy to just play around with the color a bit to match them up.

I have so many of ideas I’m playing with right now and I will share more of them here soon. I hope you will try this out. Please let me know in the comments.

Until next time,

Thank you stopping by,

Have a great week,

~Patty