Art Journal Page–Music and Flowers

Having completed the front page of my new leather art journal, I have now created a double-page spread in mixed media.

Music means a great deal to me; it has great emotional impact, and I have been privileged in the past to take part in group music activities, especially choir singing, which is an incomparable experience, adding something that merely listening cannot provide. Music is a gift from God and it is like being given a gift of flowers – fragrant, full of variety and colour, bountiful, beautiful, and ephemeral – but the memory lives on. Music is flowers for the ears and for the heart. This is what I wanted to express in my page.

I glued a sheet of music onto the left-hand page and trimmed it down to size. For this I used Scotch Quick-Dry Adhesive as it’s the strongest wet glue in my possession and it dries quickly. I then sprayed the open page with some DIY glimmer mist (a little Wild Honey Distress Re-Inker and some Perfect Pearls mixed with water in a small spray bottle). I sprayed a small amount in another colour (Chipped Sapphire) and immediately blotted it so the dark colour didn’t dominate. After drying it with my heat gun, I applied some Salty Ocean Distress Ink (from the Summer seasonal set) with an Inkylicious Ink Duster through my Increasing Circles stencil. Over the yellow of the background, this blue distress ink turned a good shade of green, which was the effect I wanted.

You can also see some of the embedded petals in the hand-made paper of the right-hand page. This detail shot shows the shimmering effect of the glimmer mist nicely.

I sketched the outline of the text, and the border, in pencil, and started to paint the text with titanium white acrylic paint.

This is not brilliant quality paint, and needed three coats to give decent coverage.

To finish the text, I outlined it with a black Zig pen (08 size) from my zentangle set.

The next step was to start painting the border, for which I again used the titanium white acrylic paint (3 coats). While doing this, I also painted some flowers in white over some of the stencilled circles.

To finish the border, I filled the gaps with black acrylic paint (this went on a lot better and needed only a single coat), and outlined the border with the black Zig pen. I added a row of white dots in acrylic paint just inside the border, and again outlined them with the Zig pen.

To complete the page, I added a butterfly from my stash. This was cut with Sheba, my Black Cat Cougar cutting machine, and had been sprayed with Dylusions ink sprays. I hand-embossed the wings from behind to make them slightly convex, and added some spots of white acrylic paint, and then attached it to the page with Pinflair gel glue to prevent the wings from becoming flattened.

The glimmer mist gives a gorgeous silky feel to the page, and the acrylic paint can be felt as a slightly raised texture. When embellishing the page, I tried to avoid the petals embedded in the hand-made paper, so that they became part of the design.