Pleasures and Woes

Rather than wait I thought I would show you the spread I made in my Dylusions art journal yesterday with my fabulous Golden paints winnings (see yesterday's post) immediately . I used everything that was in the tub apart from the soft gel, and also added white. As I had all 3 primary colours in the Open acrylics I could make whatever colour I wanted. I did have to wait occasionally for the various layers to dry though, in order not to get mud. I used the two fluid acrylic colours to drip down the page. For the background I used this month's Stencilgirl Club stencils which I love. They feature lots of circles so that isn't surprising! I also used sequin waste for the smaller circles.

I added further interest to the background with rubber stamping using a black Archival ink pad. The leaf stamps came from Art to the 5th (the team behind The Documented Life Project 2015) and I also used a Tim Holtz stamp (the spirals). Once the background layers were complete I added collage using both decoupage paper, vintage images and text, as well as modern text and a woman from a  fashion magazine. The final step was adding outlining with black and white markers and also a variety of water soluble oil pastels.

I am quite pleased with how this page turned out and there are some details I'm particularly pleased with and which I'm showing you here. Sometimes you find hidden gems once the page is finished and you look at it with fresh eyes.

The vintage text just popped up from my stash and seemed to catch what I wanted to express perfectly. It reads:

This Life is all chequer'd with pleasures and woes,

That chase one another like waves of the deep, -

Each brightly or darkly, as onward it flows,.......

There is a lot of sparkle on the page as one of the Golden fluid acrylics was gold and I also used a gold Crayola Twistables Slick Stix. So yummy! It looks more like ochre above but I can assure you that it is definitely golden to the eye.

Red Campion and Cow Parsley

Just up the lane a couple of minutes walk from our gate is a fantastic display of red campion and cow parsley at the moment, and today I walked up to take photographs. They are a perfect combination and this year they have both hit their best moments at the same time to form a combination of lacy loveliness.

 It's a very rich display as you can see best on the photograph below which incorporates part of the lane.

What riches, and the picture below shows another gift that came my way by simply liking Jackson's Art Supplies on Instagram. It wasn't a lie either. They are the one place here in the UK where you are almost guaranteed to find the hard to get art supplies you're looking fo,r as well as a wealth of papers and sketchbooks. They stock the whole range of Golden paints and mediums too, so it is little wonder that I often find myself on their website,specially as there are instructional videos as well.

No one was more surprised than I to win this wonderful basket full of goodies. They are all gorgeous but oh, that golden fluid acylic (seen middle bottom) is the stuff dream are made off. I can easily see that I will need to get more once this bottle is used up!