I loved the last circle journal with my fellow Paperartsy fans (Patwits) so much I immediately wanted to be involved for the second round… and we inspired others to join in so we are now 12 in number! Whoop!
We each got to choose a shape of journal each and I chose Square as I often create square shaped art. So I created my journal from Mixed Media cardstock for the pages and some recycled board from the stash. I punched holes and added the book rings for easy binding.
Now for the fun part… Starting the art!
So from grey board to colour! Gesso first then Haystack and some orange and red paints. I started to build colours and layers and textures.
Now some stencilling. I decided to embrace circles in contrast to the square shape. I grabbed all stencils with circle themes and just started adding colour and contrast.
Then I grabbed the circles from the Kim Dellow stamp set and stamped the little circles in grey archival and the large circles in white gesso.
Then I took a large circle mask and the dotty wave stencil and through that I added the texture gloss paste from Ranger. This is new for me so it was a real experiment. Time to set it aside to dry. It took a few hours.
Here is a close up of the gorgeous texture …
Decided to emphasise the circle more with some Chocolate Pudding paint.
I kept the paint light and wiped it away a little to ensure there was some transparency still through to the under layers. Although the texture paste has some resist, the freco paints pretty much adhere to everything so you need to be careful to not cover everything! I decided it needed more pattern and more paint…. forgot photos for the next 30 mins play! Oops!
So there are Darcy stamps (again circle themed) and more red and brown paints added. I also added some copper paint to give it a shine too, unfortunately it doesn’t show on this picture.
I wanted a raised part to the cover as the book rings mean that it won’t interfere with what other people want to do as they can remove the pages and work on them outside the journal confines. So grabbed some corrugated card and tore it into a roundish shape and pulled some of the cover off to expose the texture. Then gave it a coat of gesso.
Once it was dry I added colour and stamping so I could build up the layers.
I used a few Ellen Vargo stamps… yes circle themed ones to add the interest. I also started adding some copper paint and then later I also added some treasure gold.
On separate cardstock I stamped and painted one of Darcy’s hearts and cut it out. I adhered this on the corrugated card and added a layer of glossy accents to it.
It was still wet and quite milky in this picture.
Next I needed a title for my journal so stamped it out onto some Cheesecake painted paper using alpha stamps.
I outlined these little strips once I stuck them down onto the journal. You can see I had also adhered the corrugated card too but was still waiting for the glossy accents to finish drying.
Whilst waiting I wanted some more embellishments so had a hunt through the stash and found some wooden hearts. I wanted to change their colour though and decided the Pebeo Fantasy Moon paints would work well….
These also take a while to dry so I left the journal overnight to dry before carrying on.
This is how it looked all stuck together the next day. I was happy with it like this…
… Now all I needed to do was the inside of the cover so that I could write my ‘instructions’ to my fellow journallers. I had started the inside at the same time as the front so it was the same base colours, but I wanted it to look different.
I started by adding some white gesso through a stencil.
Then stamped the JOFY flowers also in the gesso.
I used the Spectrum Noir pencils to add some colour. Also stamped and coloured the little JOFY circles.
Next to add the ‘rules’ for the journal by stamping with alphas onto white card and adding them with matt medium.
So this was the inside cover done and dusted along with the front cover. I also made my page and tag but will share that another day.
Happy travels dear journal.
Happy crafting!
Catherine
Inkyfingeredcat 