Merry Art Journal Page

Good morning

This will be my last post for this year and I want to take this opportunity to wish you all a very merry Christmas and a happy and healthy 2022.

I really appreciate the time you spend here on my blog and look forward 

to sharing more of my papercraft projects with you in the coming year.

A new year is always exciting I think, because we don't know what the future will bring for us

 and what changes we will make as the year goes by.

Today I want to share a Christmas Art Journal page.

I love Christmas trees and this page features a Christmas tree, although I have to admit that wasn't my original idea.

I had planned on having the baubles hanging from the top of the page and the background was going to look like the tree, so a closeup of the tree if you will.

The proportion of the baubles to the background did not look right to me when I tried this 

so I had a re-think and decided to make a Christmas tree shape using the baubles

 and I have to admit, I am quite happy with the results.

I used Woodware Bubble Mini Bauble stamp, Versafine Onyx Black Ink, Embossing Buddy, 

Clear embossing powder and smooth white cardstock to heat emboss twelve of the baubles.

I coloured each of the baubles with Distress/Distress Oxide inks, and a water brush, using two tones of each colour on each bauble, so they had a little shading.

 These are the colours I used:-

Distress Ink Bundled Sage & Distress Oxide Cracked Pistachio

Distress Oxide Shaded Lilac & Distress Ink Dusty Concord

Distress Oxide Tattered Rose & Distress Ink Spun Sugar

Distress Ink Mowed Lawn & Distress Ink Pine Needles

Distress Ink Faded Jeans & Distress Ink Chipped Sapphire

Distress Ink Barn Door & Distress Ink Fired Brick

Distress Ink Carved Pumpkin & Distress Ink Ripe Persimmon

Distress Ink Festive Berries & Distress Ink Candied Apple

Distress Ink Scattered Straw & Distress Ink Mustard Seed

Distress Ink Victorian Velvet & Distress Ink Picked Raspberry

Distress Oxide Salty Ocean & Distress Oxide Blueprint Sketch

Distress Ink Peeled Paint & Distress Ink Twisted Citron.

Once all of the baubles were coloured, I fussy cut them and 

inked around the edges, with Archival Jet Black ink

To create the background I used a sponge to pounce acrylic paint to the whole area.

I used Southwest Teal, Seabreeze Turquoise and Jade Green,

 blending them until I was happy with the look.

The texture for the background comes from putting Avocado Acrylic paint

through Kaisercraft's Lattice stencil,

Modelling Paste through TCW Mini Labyrinth 6" stencil

and stamping Uniquely Creative's Wavy Words stamp with Archival Jet Black ink.

I attached the baubles to the page using Gloss Gel, 

I also coated the whole page with the gel being careful 

not to smudge the inks used to colour the baubles. 

This will help the baubles to stay in place and allow me to use my 

black Stabilo All pencil to shade around the baubles.

I cut a base for my tree and a star from some gold cardstock and added them to the page.

To highlife the gold pieces I used a black paint marker

to draw faux stitching around their edges.

My title was die cut from black cardstock using Kaisercraft's DD700 Alphabet Upper Case dies.

To add some shine to my page I gave the larger circles on the baubles a coat of Glossy Accents

The final touch for the page was to use some watered down black acrylic paint

in a Fineliner bottle to draw a scribbly boarder.

Here is my process video

Well that's it for me for this year

Thank you for spending part of your day here with me today

Once again I hope your Christmas and New Year are all that you hope they will be

Till next time

Stay safe

Hugs

Julie