Making Acrylic Paint backgrounds

Yesterday I made my way to Balfron (near Stirling) to give a class on making acrylic paint backgrounds for the students of the Diploma Course in Creative Sketchbooks. This is a series of classes run by a friend of mine, Gillian Cooper and you can check them out on her website.

It was an adventurous day that started with a power cut at home. The next obstacle was the wet weather which made it necessary to stop in the lane to ascertain in various dips if I could get through the water with the car. The weather also made for heavy traffic congestion and it took me over 2 hours to reach my destination. When I phoned John to inform him of my arrival and to ask after Flora's wellbeing he didn't believe that I was parked in bright sunshine, although it was cold, with glorious views of snow on the hills.

I was there to teach how to make acrylic paint backgrounds for their sketchbooks. It's up to the students to then take such backgrounds forward and add their own unique touches to the pages. We made two projects and I worked alongside them for demonstration purposes. This is one of my pages. There is so much on this page but here are the main ideas.

We started with collage using vintage book pages, music sheets, wallpaper, vintage map etc. and one of the students even had a Chinese book and let us use the pages. No idea what it says but love the texture it gives to the page.

We added our paints (I used a gird like arrangement), then stamped and stencilled on the pages. I used an art foamie Ring Tic-Tac designed by Julie Fei-Fan Balzer for Art Foamies as well as a stamp from http://www.impressmenow.com/. I stencilled using stencils from The Crafter's Workshop as well as Stencilgirl Products(the large stencil from April 2016 Stencilgirl Club) and we also glued on bits of deli paper that we had stamped and stencilling earlier.

I will probably develop the background further in one of my future projects.

The traffic was just as bad on the way home (I'm so pleased I don't do this commuting lark on a daily basis!) but the welcome I received from my little dog was overwhelming. She remained glued to my side during the rest of the evening and at night.

Today we have practising (in a very small way) the COME command. It involved many little biscuits! And of course today is a gorgeously sunny day (although freezing cold).