Everything has beauty

I hope you had a lovely Easter weekend; here in the UK we have a four-day holiday for Easter and we have had some glorious weather, so we’ve been spending time visiting with friends, in the garden and out on our tandem (grin!).

As part of our ongoing garden project, this week we started landscaping the back beds of our garden so my page today reflects nature and earthy colour tones as I took inspiration from all the dirt we have been shovelling (grin!) along with the brick wall colours that we have been exposing and the birds that we have seen in our garden too – I hope you like it!

For my grungy background, I started by covering the page with Chestnut, Boulder, Dessert, Fawn and Topaz Spectrum Aqua markers by scribbling each of the inks onto a blending mat, spritzing with water and pressing the mat onto the page. Then I stencilled a Vintage Diamond stencil from Creative Expressions and Black Soot Distress Ink and added some pieces of decoupage paper using Liquitex matte gel medium. I used a palette knife to add some Pébéo white gesso over the page and once dry, I edged the decoupage pieces using a Dark Sepia Faber-Castell Big Brush marker smudging the ink with my finger. Then I stamped a Script stamp from Kaisercraft and also a grid patterned homemade stamp using black Archival Ink. I splattered the page with the Dark Sepia Faber-Castell Big Brush Marker ink by scribbling it onto an acrylic block, spritzing with water and dripping it onto the page. Then I used black Archival Ink to stamp the bird on the branch which is part of the Urban Tapestries stamp set from Tim Holtz and also the flowers in the foreground which is from a Carabelle Studio stamp set. To finish, I added two Small talk stickers from Tim Holtz and edged them using a black Uni Pin marker; they read “live gently on the earth” and “everything has beauty”.

I had a cuppa with friends at Bijou of Lytham last week, it’s a pretty place and I had a wonderful time catching up with some friends – here’s my pot of drinking green tea …

… and my friend’s hot chocolate with all the works (marshmallows and cream) – as T Stands for Tuesday I’m wishing the T Gang a very Happy T Day!

Challenges

I’m glad I found out about Challenge Blogs as I enjoy taking part, they provide me with inspiration for my pages and are a wonderful way to meet like-minded arty people. So here are the challenges I’m joining today:

I’m pleased to join the lovely Wendy from Wendy’s Art and Craft Journal  and her Having Fun challenge over at Art Journal Journey as I had fun using all the different mediums to create this page.

I’m happy to join the Neutral Zone challenge over at A Vintage Journey with my grungy Mixed Media Style page.

I’m also pleased to be able to join in the fun over at Creative Artiste Challenge Blog, and their Creative Artiste’s #48th Challenge  – Anything Mixed Media Goes challenge with the different mixed media (markers, inks, decoupage paper, gesso) I used to create my art journal page.

Thanks for joining me today! If you have any questions or comments, I would love to hear from you.

Here is a list of all the materials used to create this art journal page:

• Spectrum Aqua Markers (Chestnut, Boulder, Dessert, Fawn, Topaz)
• Tim Holtz Distress Ink (Black Soot)
• Pébéo White Gesso
• Faber-Castell Big Brush Pitt artist pen (Dark Sepia 175 B)
• Ranger Archival Ink (Jet Black)
• Uni Pin Fine Line marker (Black 0.1mm)
• Creative Expressions Mini Stencils (Vintage Diamond CEMSDIAM)
• Kaisercraft clear stamp (Script CS752)
• Homemade Wood Mounted Stamp – plasterboard tape
• Tim Holtz Collection Stampers Anonymous (Urban Tapestry CMS061)
• Carabelle Studio Art Stamp (SA60175 Dans la nature, il y a …)
• Trimcraft (Decoupage papers SCDEC025)
• Tim Holtz idea-ology (Small Talk #TH93193)
• Liquitex Matte Gel Medium