End of Summer

Over at Visible Image this week, our Design Team theme is End of Summer.  For my inspiration, I’ve chosen the zinnias and sunflowers in my garden that are blooming their socks off and will continue to do so until the first frosts.  I grew these from seed and have loved watching them develop through the various stages.

For my non-card make, I decided to have a play in my art journal, something I don’t often do and it pushed me a bit out of my comfort zone.  On a double page spread, I stamped all the elements using Versafine Clair Nocturne ink and the Sunflower Grunge, Daisy Grunge and Create Happiness stamp sets.  The flower in Create Happiness is actually a gerbera but it’s close enough to a zinnia for me!

The pages were sprayed with Distress Spray Stains and a gold mica shimmer.  They turned out a bit dark but I thought I could lift some of the colour out.  That didn’t work, so lesson one of today’s make was that the mica spray seems to seal the colour in so I needed another plan - I’d go darker with the flowers.  I painted the Distress Spray stains directly onto the flowers and leaves. 

This still wasn’t dark enough to make the flowers really pop so I then did some sketchy colouring with Sharpie markers and added yellow dots around the centres with a Posca pen.

Whilst the Sharpies made the flowers more colourful, they still didn’t really pop against the background.  From my watercolour painting, I’ve learnt that sometimes you need to make the surroundings even darker to make the focal points pop so I tried painting in some dark green Distress Oxide.  It didn’t work and also, I didn’t like it! 

Time for drastic action! I decided I needed to go really dark so used a brown Sharpie to colour around the flowers, dragging it out to the rest of the pages.  Now I was getting somewhere.

The pages still needed some light so I splattered Dr pH Martin Bleedproof white on but that wasn’t quite bright enough.  Using the Atmospheric stencil, I applied opaque Distress Grit Paste using a spatula in areas over the pages.

Finally, the last highlights were added using the Colourblind stencil and some Hero Arts Unicorn ink, applied using a small brush.

I was happy with the end result and it was an interesting challenge trying the different corrections to make the project work. 

Here are a couple of close ups.