Today sees the start of a new challenge over at A Vintage Journey and I had lots of fun art journaling for Astrid’s fabulous Tissue Paper challenge.
Here’s what we would like you to do this month:
“As the title suggests, use tissue paper. There are many different ways you can incorporate tissue paper into your project – create texture by scrunching it up, stain it, paint it, wax it, stamp on it, emboss on it. You could use cheap tissue from the supermarket, recycle gift wrapping tissue, or even use old dressmaking patterns. Just remember to create in one of our preferred styles of vintage, shabby, mixed media, art journaling, industrial, timeworn or steampunk”.
Inspired by a beautiful display of flowers in my garden, I used a couple of new techniques with tissue paper to create the background as well as all the foliage and flowers on this page – I hope you like it!
For my tissue paper background, I started by stamping Mowed Lawn, Chipped Sapphire, Twisted Citron and Peacock Feathers Distress Inks onto a blending mat, spritzing with water.
I pressed the tissue paper onto the blending mat and spritzed with more water to disperse the colour. Then I lifted the tissue paper off the blending mat and dried it with my heat gun.
Next I scrunched the tissue paper into a ball, unravelled it so it still retained most of the creases, stuck it onto my art journal page using a UHU Stic and trimmed off the excess tissue to fit the page. Then I brushed a Watermark stamp pad over the raised creases on the page, applied silver embossing powder and heated it using a heat gun; this was a fun new technique for me.
I love the veins of silver that resulted. I chose the silver as it depicts the backdrop of silver-leafed plants that are in the flower bed in my garden.
Next I selected tissue papers from my craft stash, I was actually surprised by how many different coloured tissue papers I had as they are all recycled from gift wrapping (grin!). I cut the green and beige tissue paper into strips to create some of the foliage and also layered some tissue papers 5 pieces thick and die cut it using Wildflower Stems Tim Holtz thinlets and my Big Shot machine to create more foliage and flowers for my page.
I gradually built up the foliage first by layering the strips of light green, dark green and beige tissue paper and the cream die cut tissue paper pieces onto the page using matte gel medium. When the gel medium was dry I outlined the strips with a black fine line marker and then coloured them using Sea Green, Evergreen and Dessert Spectrum Aqua markers. For the cream pieces I outlined them with a white gel pen and shaded them using a Cold Grey Big Brush marker.
To create my pink flowers, I used a flower die cut and turned it upside down so they were the same shape as the ones in my garden. To create different looking flowers and a 3D effect, I also cut the die cut flower shape into individual petals so that I could build up the layers on each flower.
The yellow centres are created using rolled up tissue paper which I cut into small pieces using scissors and stuck in place like all these tissue elements using matte gel medium, when dry I added more detail using a black fine line marker and white gel pen. I also built up layers of the die cut green tissue paper for their stems and leaves and once the gel medium was dry, I outlined everything using a black fine line marker and added more detail to the leaves with this marker too. As the flowers in my garden are so bold and beautiful, I added the words “Live your life out loud” which is a Kaisercraft sticker edged with the Cold Grey Big Brush marker; this finished the page.
As some of you may be aware we replanted our flower beds last year, so we have lots of new flowers in our garden. These bright pink Tanacetum Coccineum flowers have grown beautifully this year and are definitely a favourite of mine so I wanted to capture their beauty on my art journal page (grin!).
Here’s a view of the flowers with the silver-leafed plants in the background which inspired the silver embossing powder background of my page (double grin!).
There’s lots more inspiration at A Vintage Journey, so please pop over to see the amazing creations made by my fellow Creative Guides.
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:
- Tim Holtz Distress Ink (Mowed Lawn, Chipped Sapphire, Twisted Citron, Peacock Feathers)
- Recycled tissue paper (White, Light Green, Dark Green, Beige, Cream, Pink, Yellow)
- Tsukineko Versamark (Watermark Stamp Pad)
- Papermania Embossing Powder (Silver)
- Sizzix Thinlets Tim Holtz Alterations (Wildflower Stems #2 661808)
- Uni Pin Fine Line Marker (Black 0.05mm)
- Spectrum Aqua Artist Marker (Sea Green, Evergreen, Dessert)
- Uniball Signo Gel Pen (White)
- Faber-Castell Big Brush Pitt artist pen (Cold Grey IV 233)
- Kaiercraft Sticker Sheet (Fly Free SS289)
- UHU Stic
- Liquitex Matte Gel Medium
- Ranger Heat Gun
