waterlilies

Hello, my friends.  It's been wonderful having a few days that are cool enough not to need the A/C on.  But I think it's supposed to get hot again this week.  I'm also starting to get a few ripe tomatoes from the plants on my patio.  They taste soooo much better than the ones you get at the grocery store.

This week I've been working on a challenge for OWSE Yahoo group art journal club.  It's a background made using thick gesso and an embossing folder.  Since I don't have any thick gesso, I decided to make some.  I found several recipes on line, so I sort of ad libbed and mixed up some white glue, baby powder, water and white acrylic paint until I had a pretty thick solution.  Then I spread some on my page and pressed my embossing folder into it.  When I lifted the folder off, I could tell that my solution wasn't really thick enough.  I scraped some of it off, let it set for a couple of minutes and then did the embossing folder thing again.  Although it was better, I still wasn't completely satisfied with the result.  I was really hoping the pattern of the embossing folder would show more, but there was only a slight resemblance.  So for the facing page, I decided to use Spackle instead.  The result was similar to my homemade gesso, even though the Spackle was a better consistency for the technique.

I let the pages dry and then sanded over some of the rougher areas, and then painted the pages with a very watered down blue acrylic paint.  The next step was adding some distress ink with a sponge.  I used faded jeans and chipped sapphire. 

The next step was to use some ink spray on an embossing folder and then use it like a stamp, pressing it on the page.  This part didn't work at all, since I had so much texture, there really wasn't enough solid surface to pick up the ink.  I only got a few little spots where the ink showed.

I thought the pages looked so much like water, I decided to follow through on that theme and made some waterlilies and lily pads.  I made a pattern for the leaves and cut them from wild wasabi card stock and then sponged the edges with always artichoke and purely pomegranate ink.  I used a stylus to make a center vein on each leaf.

The lilies are made with a 6 petal flower punch.  I sponged the centers of each white flower with pink passion ink and then used a stylus to make the flowers curl.  I stacked five for each lily.  For the centers, I punched some yoyo yellow with another flower punch.  I trimmed off the tips of the petals on one and left the other, using two for each of the flowers.  I sponged the edges with pink passion and then glued each flower all together.

I decided to use this spread for my August Divine Design Bible Verse challenge on SCS, so I chose Psalm 51: 10 as my verse. Because my computer died about a week ago, I'm temporarily using DH's extra laptop, which doesn't have all the programs I usually use, so instead of printing out my verse, I hand printed it (about five times, since I messed it up a few times).  I finally managed to get one that looked OK.  I sponged the edges with artichoke ink and then glue it down.  I really love how this spread turned out.

Thanks so much for stopping by.  Have a wonderful week.