Jonah | Amy Kattenbelt | Inspired by another hobby

Good Morning UK Scrap Addicts, I am here to share with you my layout that was inspired by one of my other hobbies....Art Journalling.

For more than 10 years I avoided all things mixed media when I was scrapbooking. I discounted anything that used paint and sprays. I thought they were too scary as they were pretty unpredictable and messy.

Then, thanks to Shimelle's influence I tried finishing my layouts with a little controlled splatter of ink...and I loved how it looked. Slowly my confidence to use mixed media products grew and I learnt to embrace the curled pages and the whoops moments when something didn't turn out how I wanted.

 Last year I started down the slippery slope of Art Journalling (a hobby that involves as much stash shopping as scrapbooking!). Now I absolutely love nothing more than sitting with an empty page in my journal and some tubes of paint and just playing about...sometimes I love the results and other times not so much.

I wanted to created a layout that was heavily influenced by some of my favourite art journal products. Here is what I pulled out to create my layout...

I picked my favourite colours of Golden Acrylic paint, scraps of papers (photocopied old family documents, book paper, music manuscript and a photo from a magazine), a stencil, black pen, tim holtz ephemera and word stickers, matte medium, a date stamp, some rub one and my heat gun.

I started by using clear gesso on a piece of 12x12 card stock and printing my photo on matte paper and cutting it out.

I then created a collage base using the scraps of paper with the matte medium. My favourite tool to do this is my hands...applying the matte medium (which I use as a glue) to the back of the scraps and then also to front once they are in place. I created a very rough diamond shape design to the right of the page for my photo to sit on, and a smaller triangle shape to the top left for my title. I made sure to leave plenty of white space.

I then used a flat brush, and my fingers to layer up my acrylic paints. I added pops of teal towards the end of the process, and also used a stencil brush with one of the paints and the leaf stencil. Something I'm still having to be mindful of is that often "less is more" When I was happy with the paint layers, I added some tissue paper that had been stamped on and layered that in with the paint. The black lines on the tissue gave me something to ground my photo on to. I then doodled black squiggly lines around the painted areas trying to emphasis the diamond and triangle shapes. I added some wings to my photo and stuck it to my layout. 

I finished my layout with some very old teal rub ons, some phrase stickers, some star stickers and star enamel dots plus a couple of black heart puffy stickers.

I encourage you all to give something new a try...challenge yourself to do something you think isn't for you...it might turn out to be one of the best things you ever do!

Thanks for reading, be sure to head on over to our Facebook group where we will be sharing our new challenge at the start of June!