While we are learning about the fabulous Gelatos® Made by Faber Castell, I thought you would enjoy meeting Alison Day. Previously we have discussed some ideas on finding inspiration. The popularity and visual context that Pinterest employees, makes it great place to look for inspiration. In today’s post, Alison combines using something she saw on Pinterest with Gelatos to create a fun art journal page.  This same technique with the Gelatos could easily be used on a scrapbook page, a card, or mixed media place!  So heeeeere’s Alison! (Insert my Ed McMahon introducing Johnny Carson voice!)

Hi everyone! My name is Alison Day and I am super excited to be a Guest Blogger here at Artful Adventures. I am a fairly recent “dabbler” in the art journaling world but from the very first time I put gesso on a page I was hooked.  I can usually be found at Alison Day Designs sharing my love of scrapbooking. Since discovering all the different multimedia techniques used in art journaling, my scrapbooking pages have taken on a decidedly ‘artsy’ feel. But I digress.

Today I wanted to share with Kristie’s readers one of my favourite places to find inspiration for my pages – whether they are scrapbook pages or art journaling pages. And that is Pinterest. Pinterest has become a fantastic way to gather images that inspire you, and a way to share your own projects and products in the hopes of inspiring others. I admit to losing myself a little bit when looking for said inspiration! Things like a 15 minute time limit are excellent tools to remember when surfing online galleries such as Pinterest! Are you on Pinterest? Here’s a link to my boards – I’d love to connect with you there so please follow me!

For today’s post I created an art journal page using this image I found as inspiration for my background.

I loved both the colours used and the painting that the colours were pulled from. I thought the painting would make a great background texture for an art journal page but you could just as easily use this as a background for a layout or card. That would look awesome!!

Here’s my finished page. What do you think?

Here’s how I created the background.

To get started I printed off my inspiration piece and searched in my Gelato stash for matching colours. The gold one on the far right was a design choice. I hoped it would add a bit of shimmer to the page instead of going with a more flat yellow colour.

The next step was simply to scribble all over my page with my Gelato’s – following as best I could the colour placement in the inspiration piece.

I knew I needed to blend the colours to get the soft look from the original painting. Instead of using a paint brush and cup of water, I pulled out a water brush (from my Stampin’ Up days), filled the handle and got busy.

It wasn’t giving me the soft blended look I was trying to achieve so I spritzed it with a bit of water to see if that would help.

I admit that at this point it looked nothing like the inspiration piece and I was a tiny bit disheartened but … not to worry! I found a fix!!

I wondered what would happen if I dabbed at the page with a piece of paper towel. Voila! The soft blended look I had been trying to achieve revealed itself!

I may have let out a squeal of delight at this point, but let’s keep that between ourselves, okay?

Once my background was dry I started adding my stamping. I’d decided on the phrase “find your wings and fly” so stamped that out using different letter stamps from my stash. I would have used Stazon ink for this if I’d been able to find my ink pad  but … regular black ink had to suffice.

Here is a close up of the word ‘FLY’. I used a Post-it note to cover half of a butterfly stamp at a time so I could get just one wing on each side of the word.

I did more stamping – love how it’s all imperfect! I also punched a few small butterflies out of some Crate Paper vellum to add more colour, texture and whimsy.

The last thing I did was splatter the page with some watered down white acrylic paint. I keep it in an old Mister Huey bottle and decided to try spraying it on the page this time instead of shaking it from the nozzle. It was totally messy and I did use my paper towel to soak up some of the excess but I love the added texture.

Here’s another look at the finished page.

Thanks for having me today! I find Kristie’s style so fun and love her easy to follow tutorials, don’t you? I’d love for you to stop by and say hi over at Alison Day Designs or connect with me on Facebook. Any friend of Kristie’s is a friend of mine!!