sun and moon

Hello my friends.  I hope your week has been going great.  I'm not sure where mine has gone, but it sure seems to have sped by.  What have I been doing this week?  One day I went to Michael's and spent one of the gift cards I received for my birthday last month.  Of course I spent way more than the gift card was worth, but I also had a coupon for 20% off my whole purchase, so it was money well spent.  I bought a number of tubes of acrylic paint.  I asked my artist daughter for color recommendations, because I knew that I needed some basics, but couldn't get every color they had.  I've been working with some very old (probably at least 30 years) craft paints, some of which are sorta dried out or lumpy.  Plus, I know that even with as many as I have, I still am missing certain basic colors.

I also stopped at the garden center & picked up a few tomato plants and a flat of impatiens.  I planted the tomatoes in large pots on the patio and the impatiens in porch boxes.  Hopefully, I'll get some tomatoes this year.

I've also signed up for a stamp carving class from Julie Balzer.  I think that will be fun.

While browsing through some web groups that I'm in, I came across a challenge to make a journal spread with a sun and moon.  It looked like fun, so I decided to join in.

I started with pages already coated with gesso and swiped watercolor crayons over the entire page and then blended with a water brush.  I let that dry and then added a few colors of acrylic paint through a Swiss dots stencil from The Crafter's Workshop.

For each of the circle shapes, I folded a piece of paper and cut a curve and then opened it back up.  I placed the outer portion down on my page and painted gesso inside the circle.  After that was dry, I painted over the gesso with yellow, using more than one yellow to add some shading.

I partially made the facial features with paint, but mostly I used colored pencils.  I don't know much about blending and shading paints, and I'm also kinda messy with a brush, so the pencils worked a little better, although I like the smoother finish the paints give.  I definitely need a lot of practice.

On the moon page, I wanted the background darker, so I masked the moon out and sponged paint over the background.  I also added some black trees and branches cut with a Sizzix die.

I decided to use this for June's Bible verse challenge on SCS, so I printed the verse on my computer, cut it apart and sponged along the edges. 

I'm pretty pleased with how they turned out, even though I know there's still a lot of room for improvement. 

Thank you so much for stopping by.