Messing around at being creative!

Hi folks, its Angela with you today.

Sometimes I just feel like I want to mess around and experiment with different ideas and not create anything specific. This is why I have an art journal, I can play for the sake of playing and then stick the resulting artwork in there.

Today I took various bits of Mixed Media Fragments from the store (I just LOVE these bits, they are so versatile) and made two art journal pages. I wanted them to go together so I used the same colours on both pages.

For the first page I wanted to stamp the design of the media fragments over the page, but I need to make a stamp to do this. I separated the off-cut pieces from the design (hold on to these until you finish as you may decide you want to use them) then I took out some Cut and Dry foam and I heated the back with my heat gun and pressed the media fragment into it to make my own stamp. Once made I inked it up with Spiced Marmalade distress ink and stamped it on the page. As you can see from the picture I did the same with the diamond mixed Media fragment, you can use the same bit of foam because as you heat it up the previous indent disappears.

Once I had the background stamped I just added ink and distress stains randomly so it wasn't so white.

For the second page I wanted some texture on it so I turned to the texture paste. 

I used a palette knife to spread the paste through the square Mixed Media Fragment then lifted and repeated the process to give me 2 textured areas. As you can see by the third small picture, a little paste gets left behind on the piece but it is still perfectly usable for another project.

I used some gesso and then paint and distress stain on this once it had dried overnight.

Once I had the background done it was time to work on the decorative pieces. I took the diamond Mixed Media Fragment and applied gesso which I then dried with my heat gun. I squiged (very technical term I know) my distress ink - Wild Honey, Spiced Marmalade and Picked Raspberry - onto my craft mat and sprayed with water. I then dragged my gessoed piece through the ink. Once dry I applied a random layer of Rock Candy Distress Crackle and left to one side to dry overnight.

I gessoed all the other pieces I wanted to use and applied paint, stain and ink to them to get the look I wanted.

Finally I stuck the pieces where I wanted them on my pages and added some White Enamel Accents (by Ranger) to various pieces to help them stand out.

And there we have it - getting messy just because you can, no other reason than that.

Ingredients:

Mixed Media Fragments 2
Retro Frame Set
Butterfly Corner Bottom

Hypericum Berries

Words & Phrases 1