Wow. This gratitude journal entry took me quite a while. There are layers of gratitude in this and a lot of textures. I was almost done with my ideas for the page when I came across this challenge:
The snowflake on the left hand page was not attached smoothly. I have been playing with a new way of making mandalas that combines my love of making snowflakes with mandalas. I used a makeup sponge to cover a paper snowflake surrounded by a circle cutout with blue acrylic paint onto watercolor paper.
After carefully lifting up the paint covered snowflake I tried to make a print of it in my gratitude journal. That is the mandala on the right hand page. The blue paint worked as an adhesive on the thin paper, so I decided to try to put the other snowflake in paint-side-up. I put E6000 spray adhesive on the page and what ever part of the sticky painted snowflake touched the adhesive there was no adjustment allowed. So, it became a spiky textured snowflake – quite in keeping with the challenge!
The lovely artwork on the right page was contributed by the daughter of a friend who purchased a set of my coloring pages. The figure’s hand is on the left-hand page – I loved the detail of nail polish and wanted this to stand out. There are layers of writing about things I am grateful for from the last 2 weeks, but the 2 biggest are YOGA and ART. I had the idea of doing the mosaic yoga letters from the first day I was able to get back to doing any yoga – I was that excited. Making these letters took a LONG time.
I wanted the mandalas and the 2 words to really be the focal points of the pages at this point so I was going to make the background a blue wash. It was about that point that I found the texture challenge. I was not having any luck getting the snowflake on the right to do anything I wanted so I covered the page with a combination of pumice gel medium, gesso, water, and blue acrylic paint. The overview photo doesn’t capture the texture of the combination very well. I used a tissue to clean up the blue paint and I decided to add one layer of the tissue to add texture to the right hand page. Here is a slightly better view of the left hand page and also shows the found word poem that became the title of the page spread. After I cut out all the letters for both yoga and art I cut out the words that intrigued me from the leftover bits of the page from a copy of The Pilgrim’s Progress that is over 100 years old!
So here is the poem that left me breathless in its appropriateness.
Willing
Hand
I find
the book
that I am.
I am amused that I’m having technical difficulties arranging the photos of my cut out letters for ART. The process also shows my frustration with how they were turning out. I was amazed that the mulberry paper and tissue paper turned out a lot more boring looking than I had hoped. I ended up also adding some silver Liquitex paint marker to them and more gel pen marks after all of these steps. Adding blue acrylic paint to the page helped them pop out more.
I am happy with how the layout turned out as a whole and it works with last week’s Journal 52 prompt of Child’s Play. Between the guest artist and the snowflake base I felt like this and my willingness to play with my materials are thoroughly captured in this page layout. I’m actually happy with the mandala that started out backwards, too. I surrounded it with some Golden Iridescent Pearl mixed with the same blue acrylic paint and I love how that turned out. So here is my 100 Mandalas mandala 59 of 100.
Thanks for taking the time to make it through that whole post! Have a beautiful day!
lunanista 