Wildflowers Art Journal Page

Hello friends! What better way to start the week than with some stamping, watercoloring and art journaling.

 

I hope you had a good weekend! I had to take it a little easy since I have a cold and I missed my long walks. We played some Monopoly instead. I don't know how my eldest always manages to win at Monopoly. We have a South African version and it is fun to talk about the various places while playing. 

This week at the Simon Says Stamp Monday Challenge Blog our theme is 'A Bit O' Green'. I love green and one of my favorite things with spring is how almost each day brings new shades of green. Don't miss the project by our March guest designer Ann Chuang. 

I was in the mood for art journaling and wanted to use the new beautiful Simon Says Stamp Stronger Together set. The stamp set was in the March card kits, but you can also get it on its own. I decided to stick to just watercolors, stamping and some Paper Artsy Infusions colored stains.

The technique works perfectly for cards too, just use a smaller paper and fewer of the stamps. It is best to work on watercolor paper.

Working on a cotton-rag watercolor page in my Dina Wakley Media Journal, I misted it heavily with water and then sprinkled in a tiny bit of Infusions powders. I have pierced a hole in the lid since you need so little powder. I used: Golden Sands, Emerald Isle and Olive Tree. Mist with more water to help the Infusions to blend. I dabbed off some of the brown pigment with a paper towel, to get a lighter look. This is a great background to start out from, it is interesting without being busy.

When dry, stamp flowers and leaves from Stronger Together on the page. I place a Sizzix cutting pad underneath the page to give me an even surface to stamp on. I still messed up some of the stamping, and added extra leaves to cover it up.

Mix two or three shades of green, a yellow green, a middle green and a darker cooler green. Paint the leaves, dropping in lighter and darker colors.

The flowers were painted with Cerulean blue, using more water for the lighter areas.

Paint a darker soil area at the bottom of the page and then splatter the background with the dark brown paint.

When everything was completely dry, I added details with a black pen and a white gel pen. You can also fill in some lines that have disappeared. The white pen works great when it comes to adding highlights.

Here's a close up where you can see my added black scribbles and the white lines and dots.

Painting on a tinted background gives a nice muted look to the watercolor paint, since the background shows through.

I just love the look of this type of fluid and transparent background.

The stamping on the flower to the left got messed up, so I stamped another leaf in front of the flower, covering up the area that did get stamped.

Adding strands of grass gives extra life to the page and helps to ground the flowers to the page.

I hope you will join us this week in our Bit O' Green challenge. As always, you have a chance to win a $50 gift voucher to do some fun shopping at Simon Says Stamp. You have until next Monday 8am Ohio time. 1pm UK time, 2 pm CET to join in.

Don't forget to follow Simon Says Stamp on Instagram, they post great stuff daily. 

Do you use Instagram? If so please add #sssmchallenge so we can see your entries there too.

Thank you so much for taking the time to visit my blog today!  

Happy crafting!

Anna-Karin

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