An afternoon of play

Hello everyone.  It was meant to be a play day not half-day but after I had sat & thought which actual play I was going to have, a lot of the day had gone.

Last Thursday I mentioned in my post that I was going to start an Art Journal, well that is what my play today turned out to be.

Do you remember me showing you this?

It was from a paint workshop I attended & the background technique did not quite come out as it should have done.  Nevertheless - it means I have a piece of work done by me & a problem of how to keep it & what to learn from it.  Well, I think I know what I have learnt from it & that is, a more correct way to do the background.  So that is another task for another day.

I thought I would make this the first piece of work in my new Art Journal, but before it went in there I would see what I could do with it.  That is where a lot of my time went today, because I had a good browse on the Internet for ideas.

Here is the book;

I know - very boring & uninteresting, but that is because I haven't done anything to the cover.  That's way ahead in time yet.

It was time to deal with the painting.  First I tore the edges to lose the formal straight edge.  Then I added some stamping - "DRAGONFLY", then some hand-written text.  I had found a couple of sayings to do with dragonflies that I rather liked.  Then using another freebie stamp - a dragonfly (which came with a matching die), I stamped & embossed in silver, 2 dragonflies & added a gem on their heads. Finally I added a dotted line around the dragonfly & underlined the words & added a little glitter to the large dragonfly's wings.

This is what it looks like now.

Ooh, nearly forgot I also went around the page edges with Antique Linen Distress Ink to make the torn edges stand out.

First page done.  Some of the pages I work with will be direct in the book but others will be like this one done outside the book & then glued in.

OK it will never make it to the National Gallery, but I think it looks a whole lot better than it did & it has whetted my appetite to do more.

So that's my day - I hope you have had a good one too.

'Bye for now.