butterflies

Hello, my friends.  My memory may be faulty, but I don't remember it ever being over 100 degrees here, and for sure not more than one day.  I am so very thankful for air conditioning. 

I have been working on another art journal spread for Hands & Heart.  Since I joined the group, I've been going back and working on the challenges from the beginning, trying to catch up.  This next challenge is called spooky journaling page and is basically about Halloween.  This left me in a bit of a quandary, since I don't celebrate this holiday, which concentrates on darkness and death.  I prefer to keep my focus on things that are light and full of life. 

Rather than completely ignore the challenge, I chose to make it my own.  I decided to use some of the colors that were presented - purple, orange and green, but instead of black, I went with white and yellow.  And something that to me is a wonderful presentation of life... butterflies.

Before really deciding where I was going with my spread, I coated my pages with gesso, and then I actually painted them purple.  But this was way too dark for me, so this is where I changed my mind.  Two more coats of gesso were needed to cover over the majority of the purple paint. 

I pulled out some stencils from The Crafter's Workshop and sponged paint on my pages - purple and orange. 

I stamped some butterflies (wonderful wings - SU) with jet black stazon and used sponges to add color before cutting them out. 

I punched out some flowers from some designer paper, keeping with the color scheme. 

At this point there were still some pretty big areas of white on my pages, so I sponged some yellow ink around to fill in a bit.  I liked it better, but still felt that something more was needed, so I pulled out another stencil and added some green ink.  I really liked the change that made. 

I printed out the sentiment on my computer, cut it apart and edged the pieces with a black marker.  Then I placed everything where I wanted it and glued it all down and drew in the butterfly antennae. 

Although this spread is quite a bit more bold than I usually make, I really like how it turned out and I feel really good about the fact that I chose to be myself and make it my own.