"This was Awesome, Epic, Cool" for Let's Get Sketchy

Finally finished this one! It was a work in progress for about a month, if you can believe it. I started off with the background by playing around in my art journal a bit to see what could be accomplished with some white gesso, Dylusions sprays, a stencil, and some texture paste that became rock hard. (FYI: I don't know if there's an easier way, but I just broke off a chunk of texture paste and let it soak in a puddle of water for a while. It still never spread beautifully, I had to really smoosh it into the stencil, but it's not like I could go out and buy another pot of the stuff because, well, Vanderhoof!)

So, if you would like to recreate something like this background on your own layout, here's what I did:

1. Apply a thin, random layer of white gesso all over the middle of a piece of thick kraft cardstock. I used an old gift card to spread the gesso.
2. Spray Dylusions Ink Spray through a stencil, again, randomly. Don't worry if you go off the edge of the gesso, it just gives some more variation of colour as the gesso tones down the bright colours of the spray quite a bit. I used Postbox Red, Squeezed Orange, and Lemon Zest as my three colours, but I could not for the life of me find the brand/manufacturer of the leaf stencil!
3. Apply texture paste in random areas over the gesso and ink spray. The texture paste will pick up some of the colour from the sprays, so you will end up with some white areas as well as some coloured leaves.
4. Any areas that feel too white, take a gelato (I chose gold) and colour the texture paste. It will be bumpy, but that's okay! Then you can use a waterbrush (or paintbrush dipped in water) and spread the gelato out more evenly. I ended up with some really pretty gold, sparkly leaves that the photos don't really do justice to.

After the background was done to my liking, it was relatively simple to lay out rest of the elements according to this great sketch from Let's Get Sketchy:

Here's a few close-ups of the journaling and other details like the die cuts:

It's a pretty busy layout, but I like it! I don't think it's Brenna's favourite, though. She said to me, "Don't you think there's just too many fall colours in there?" and I said, "Nope! It's a fall page." But yeah, maybe she's right? What do you think?

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"Well Hello There" for Creative Scrappers 296

Hey everyone, just popping in on this gloomy Sunday to share my latest layout with you. 

Honestly, this is not the most embellished layout, but I'm loving how it turned out. It features a photo of Brenna from almost two years ago, and I can't remember what was going on when I took the photo, but her face looks so cute, and she looks like she's begging or pleading for something. It couldn't remain unscrapped any longer!

I used this sketch from Creative Scrappers:

And if you pop over there, they have a code for a free cutfile called Chopsticks from Just Nick, which is what I used on my page. I cut it out from white cardstock, and spent a morning last weekend using Distress Ink and my waterbrush to create a rainbow effect. If I were to do this again, however, I'd use watercolour paper, because often the colours would not blend how I was hoping they would. Ah well, live and learn. Plus, it all turned out in the end.

After I had the rainbow background down, I spent the better part of a week pushing stuff around on my page. Does it ever take you forever to get the simplest page finished?  Anyway, I finally got it how I thought it should go, but then I thought I would add some ink splatters. Good idea in theory, until a big huge splotch of the teal stuff plopped right onto my page! There may have been tears or screams of rage, but I've blocked that out of my mind permanently - hopefully my family has too! So I decided to move one of those embellishment clusters over to partially cover up the mess, rather than cut and colour a new rainbow, and it is what it is.  If I didn't tell you about it, maybe you wouldn't even notice, right?  Haha, yeah right!

So that's it from me for now.  Hope you've had a great weekend, and here's to getting some more scrappy stuff done next week!

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