Art Journal Page–Dare to be Different Part 2

I have now completed this page.

Please see Part 1 for how I started to make the project.

All that remained to be done was to paint the border and add the text.

I began by inserting some scrap paper under the pages to protect the rest of the book, and painted a narrow border with white acrylic paint.

I added squares in black acrylic, and also the black and white spots and dots. I like the contrast of black and white against the rainbow background, and it also serves to tie in the almost monochrome focal-point cats.

A detail of the border.

To make the text, I decided the style needed to be fairly bold and a bit edgy, and not flowery or fluid, to co-ordinate with the fairly feisty cats and the attitude I wanted to convey with this page. I drew the letters on some strips of scrap card, using my archival black drawing pens, and one letter in red.

I cut them out and inked the edges with Black Soot distress ink, using a home-made ink blender.

The pieces were then stuck down with regular matt gel medium.

The final touch was to add some shadow. I outlined each piece using a Uniball white marker – this is water soluble, so I sprayed the whole page (again, protecting the rest of the book with pieces of scrap paper) with some clear spray matt varnish, and then added a drop shadow to the text pieces and the two cats, using a charcoal grey Inktense pencil, and blending it out with a fine wet brush.

Detail of the cats.

Detail of the top left-hand corner, showing the border and the rainbow kitties.

Detail of the bottom right-hand corner.

This project was worked in conjunction with the Valentine card that I made for my hubby. That was done with Dylusions spray inks and Inktense pencils and had a smoother finish, and the whole thing was gentler and less grungy and aggressive. I wanted a different effect for my art journal page, and was pleased with how the Dylusions paints came out – I was anxious not to disturb the kitty masks while painting the background, so used a stippling technique with the brush, and on the slightly textured paper of the book, this gave just the effect I was after. As you can see on the above picture, there are some nice variations in the colour on the kitties, giving a distressed look. This was quite accidental – due to the residue of the glue I used, acting a a resist. Happy accident! (I like that sort.)

Here are the two projects side by side for comparison:

and a comparison of the kitty backgrounds in more detail.

This is a project that has been in embryo for a very long time, stamping and cutting out the Kitty Squad stamps and using them as masks, and I am very pleased to have completed it at last.