Art therapy

It's been a funny kind of week. Although I am feeling loads better now, I felt shocking last week. I had a cold which wasn't too bad for a day or so then it turned into an ear ache/sinus blocked thingy. As I've had sinus issues before, I know the signs and what to do before it gets a hold of me so although I'm not fighting fit just yet, I do feel human again now.

Prior to getting sick, I spent a lot of time working in my garden. I never had the time or the inclination when I was working full time but it has been bugging me for the last couple of years and this year I decided to tackle the mammoth task. I know absolutely nothing about gardening whatsoever, so this is a real learning curve for me and whilst it was very satisfying watching it transform into a place where I would like to spend some time, I really missed my artsy stuff!!! I really needed to splodge some paint on something so I grabbed a journal and did just that.

I brayered a few colours of paint on my page just get some background colour  (I used Honey Dew, Wisteria, Cheesecake and Caribbean Sea Fresco Finish paint).

I used some Taupe through a few favourite stencils.

Then some Nougat. All colours so far were opaque.

Time to add some translucent paint to bring it to life. I added Limelight and Tango using a baby wipe to gently blend the colours.

I wanted to use Hey Pesto for my fern thingies but as that is a translucent colour, I needed to add a layer of Snowflake first so that the Hey Pesto would show over the busy background.

Then by mistake, I picked up a some Limelight instead of Hey Pesto so now my three fern thingies are three different colours. Happy accident me thinks, I like them all different colours!!!

As they were really quite plain, I decided to stamp some images on them. I made a paper mask for the heads of the ferns to help with placement. I usually use the stencil as my mask but this stencil is quite thick and I wouldn't have been able to stamp the images right up to the edges.

I used my Fibralo pens to add shading around the edges....

.....and some gold stars to fill in the gaps.

It's been ages since I created a page in my journal......I feel better now.