Saturday, January 18, 2014

COME WITH ME TO THE SEA

Hi Everyone!

The prompt for Journal 52 WEEK 2 is Somewhere: A Simple Place.  This could be a place you love or want to visit or a fantasy place, a place that has meaning to your life.  What came to mind immediately was the place where I have lived near most of my life, the ocean.

Did I mention about trying to use up the supplies I have on hand for this journal project? My aim this year to use up some of the supplies I've accumulated and so, there may be some odds and ends used as embellishments.  I'm good with that, hope you will enjoy it too!

  COME WITH ME TO THE SEA........

Chelle asked us to build a frame around our page, add lines for text and to use magazine images.

This is how I made my page:

A very thin coat of Gesso is applied with a credit card to smooth it over the page. Gesso as a base for each page gives it "tooth" and allows colors to flow and not seep onto the next page.  I also put a piece of wax paper under the page to protect the others underneath from gesso seepage which can "glue" the papers together.

Most often I don't have a plan when I start but this time there was a sparkle of an idea in my brain (although I didn't think it through very well), that would include a starfish stamp, a painted wave, text and a border of some kind.  I thought if I laid down the blue and green in the shape of a wave cresting everything would fall into place from there.  Putting the writing on the page before more color was applied made sense.  I drew wavering lines for the text to fit in the blank space created by the wave shape, then wrote the words on each line.  Come With Me To The Sea was the title line so I printed it boldly, then the rest was written in cursive.  I used a permanent black ink pen (waterproof when dry) to thicken up the letters and lines some, and as you can see when the ink isn't totally dry it will smug! Lesson learned.

I had to hunt down (seriously) the starfish stamp and started stamping them on the page when I realized I'd gotten a bit ahead of myself and needed to create a border.  SO I dig through my box of scrappy stuff to see what can be use for the borders. Another option would have been to draw my own borders in or cut out magazine images.  A piece of a Teavanna bag caught my attention, the design was amazing, and neutral in color. BINGO!  I started cutting the tea bag into pieces fitting them together into a border that seemed to imitate driftwood.  Adding the coral seashells for a pop of color, sand dollars and some pearls to represent treasures from the sea.  If you zoom into the page you'll see the words: treasure, discover, timeless, laugh, smile and enjoy!   The dimensional flourishes represent the cresting waves and give the page a bit of interest.

Hope you enjoyed the process!  Let me know what you think about this page, I appreciate your comments.

Suzy

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I thought it look amazing like an old map would look around the edges. Great piece. xox