Every summer I tell my self that I’m going to work in and finish my “The Sea” art journal. The problem is finding my paint mojo. I’ve talked about this before, sometimes I just don’t want to hassle with the mess and clean up!

Well, I decided to try something new to add lots of color, with out having to paint so much.

Although I did end up getting out the paints, a lot of that color is from pastels. I have owned a box of pastels for about eight years now. I may have tried them out a couple of times, but that’s it. They really gave my background the depth of color I was looking for!

The biggest difference between this page and the following one is the journaling. I really love how journaling on the page, as the last step, brings the whole look of the page together.

The first layer is just a wash of light green paint. Then I scraped pastels in green, pink, purple, blue, and yellow on their sides to cover more area. I stamped over that with bubble wrap dipped in aqua paint, let that dry, then added the geometric tissue and pieces of an envelope. When that was dry, I stenciled with gesso and a sea sponge, then went over that with a wash of tinted gesso*. For someone that doesn’t like to paint very much, I sure went to town!

I usually like to keep it pretty simple, but I was having way too much fun with the pastels and I thought the tissue and stenciling would calm it down a bit. Well, it was calm until I decided to add some orchid paint and spray it with water.

When that layer dried, I added the images from a vintage book on the sea and some postage stamps from abroad. They kind of stuck out like a soar thumb, so I went over the images and stamps with a coat of tinted gesso*.  As you can see, I still love fussy cutting my images, it makes them seem like a more organic part of the page than just cutting out a square.

I’m going to need to get used to all that action on my pages if I choose to use this technique. But, I’m willing to experiment until I find my comfort zone!

Let me know what you think, or if you have any questions.

Thank you for stopping in,

Talk to you soon,

~Patty

(*I make my tinted gesso by adding water to white gesso, then adding a little ochre and burnt umber to the mix. When I wash it over my pages, then blot with a paper towel, it tends to calm things down a bit and give the page a more cohesive look.)