Thursday 25 February 2016

Art Journal Page–Dare to be Different Part 2

I have now completed this page.

32 Completed 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.

22 Working on the Border

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.

23 The Border Complete

A detail of the border.

24 Border Detail

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.

25 Inking the Text Pieces

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

26 Inked Text Detail

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

27 Shadows Applied to Page

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.

28 Detail of Text

Detail of the cats.

29 Detal of Zentangle Cats

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

30 Detail of Top Left Corner

Detail of the bottom right-hand corner.

31 Detail of Bottom Right 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:

33 Comparison with Valentine Card

and a comparison of the kitty backgrounds in more detail.

34 Comparison of Kitty Backgrounds

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.

5 comments:

  1. Fantastic finishing touches! The inking and shading make the word tiles float above the page as if they were 3D! The border pops out of the background as well. Superb hand lettering! Our lesson last week on Wanderlust was hand lettering and I just can't find the patience for it! I'm just too hyper! You could turn yours into a font! There's an online font creator, see if I can find it for you: http://www.myscriptfont.com/ (you have to print their form, draw your own letters, scan it in and reupload - they automatically turn it into a computer font! - you could call it the Shoshi Font!) --- I've seen a notification of a comment you left Shoshi, but I can't actually see your comment on my WOYWW post. I don't know what's going on - it's not in the spam folder, and I've got all the other comments. Hopefully, it's just a glitch. I've found your lovely comment on the Oreo video on YT, though - thank you for that!) Happy Weekend!

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  2. It's so weird, Shoshi! I've got another G+ notification of yet another comment rom you, but the comment itself hasn't appeared on my blog. This has never happened before! I'll try to Google it! Anyway, don't worry about it. I'm sure it will turn up one day! Must be some weird G+ glitch!

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  3. Hi Shoshi, I saw the notification of your new comment on my watercolour flowers, but it's not on my blog. It's happening to everyone who has the G+ commenting system enabled, so it's not something that we can do anything about. I think it's only temporary and should resolve in a few days. Interestingly, some of the comments still get through but I couldn't find a pattern, so it seems to be random. Although now that I think about it, it's only the UK comments that seem to disappear! Yours and Angela's this morning, while comments from Australia, New Zealand and Spain got through! Could be just a coincidence!

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  4. That sounds strange that Zsuzsa has mentioned, wonder what they are up to now. We will have to watch out for this. Thanks for the visit to mine and your lovely comment. Now back to what I was about to say Lol!
    Wow wee!!! I just love the cat pages and the card, Love them to bits! Have a great week and happy crafting, Angela x

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  5. Wow! Great job and btw, I love cats!!! patsy

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