Recycled Mini-Album–Sun, Sea and Sand Pt 2

Following on from yesterday, the partially-completed page was still not dry, probably because the foil doesn’t exactly let the air get at the gel medium! Anyway I thought I’d work on it as it was dry enough to handle.

I chose the Deep Red Seashell Collection stamps that I got recently, and selected three different stamps, and stamped using sepia archival ink onto cream card.

I fussy cut the shells.

Then I applied some of them to the right-hand page, sticking them down with regular matt gel medium.

The next step was to paint the sand, for which I used yellow ochre acrylic paint. The coarse pumice gel medium gives a gorgeous rough texture!

I hand-wrote some text using a medium sepia waterproof pen onto the same card I used for the shells, and added some Tea Dye distress ink.

I decided to add some Zentangles as a border to the right-hand page, and selected three from my Zentangle album. Each of these ATC-sized cards has the instructions on the reverse, for drawing the design. The designs I chose were Agua, Footlites and Float Fest.

I had done quite a bit of work on the right-hand page and forgot to take any photos – after I stuck down the shells, I also stuck down the bit of net that I’d cut off from the piece on the left-hand page, using regular matt gel medium, and then adding a bit more glass bead gel medium on top. I added some shading to the shells, using distress inks as watercolours, in Tea Dye and then some Black Soot because the brown wasn’t showing up enough. I added some text around the edge of the photo to break up the hard edge, and then did the Zentangles using my white pen.

I then added the cut out words to the left-hand page and drew a border around each using the white pen, and stuck down a couple of shells at the bottom, using regular matt gel medium. This completes the page.

Now for some detail shots. First of all, the bottom-left. You can see to the left of the shells that the extra glass bead gel medium that I added has yet to dry – it looks milky, but will dry clear.

Top-left. You can see that I have extended the Float Fest Zentangle a little way onto the page, and added the white outlines to the text pieces.

Top-right.. Float Fest and Footlites Zentangles, and text added around the photograph.

Finally, bottom-right. Again, you can see the glass bead gel medium which hasn’t dried. Agua Zentangle, and a couple of swirls to fill the corner.

I am pleased with how this page has turned out, and with the introduction of some colour into this album. Most of it so far has been very monochrome or sepia. As the family history progresses, there will be some colour photos, and the backgrounds need to reflect this so that they blend in, but I shall keep the palette on each page fairly limited, I think, and maintain the black and white borders throughout. On the above photo you can see again how the borders are revealed by the decreasing size of the pages, adding a deeper border to each page as one approaches the centre of each signature.