Stepping Outside My Comfort Zone

Here we are at week 4 of our  art journaling journey for 2015. I never thought I would make it to week four and still be interested and involved. So many other times I am have participated in online classes, online projects - just to find a couple weeks in that I was bored to death. That isn't happening here. Thank you, Cherryl Moote, for putting this together!
With that being said, week four's prompt was to step outside our comfort zone and try something we had been wanting to try but might have been too unsure - AKA scared - to give it a go.

I had several ideas running rampant through my brain. Hahahaha! You know how I am! I figure I may get a good 4-5 pages done this week. And they may all look awful,  but that's okay, cause I have been given permission to step outside the zone.
So for today, I pulled out my little box of awesomeness that is called Brusho Crystal Colors.

The Brusho® website describes them as:
brilliantly intense paint powder that comes in little pots of magic!
Hahaha! So true! They are little jars filled with crystals of beautiful, lush color. My started kit came with 12 pots of color. I started by making a color chart. Literally all I did was make a drop of water from a mop brush, and shaked (shook???) a little color into the wet drop and waited. The brusho is a fine powder. Those little spots you see here and there on the paper are fine little bits of color that didn't make it to the water. And I think I was a little stingy on the color, these could have been much brighter and intense.

I played with the color on a couple zentangle® tiles to start with. Those are going to mail out in an ATC swap fairly soon. For this week's journal project, I used this paper for the first time. I wanted to keep the paper a little lighter weight, because I already knew I wasn't doing this project  directly in my journal, but building it elsewhere and glueing it in place. I'm willing to step outside my comfort zone - to a degree. Haha! (On the other hand, I wouldn't recommend this paper for a project with a lot of water. Warping was an issue, but nothing a bunch of heavy books couldn't handle.)

And this is what I did. I found a YouTube video that walked me through it. I loosely sketched out a tree trunk with a pencil. With a wet brush I picked up some brown crystals and filled in a trunk. Then I sprayed water around the top of the tree, and sprinkled three different colors of Brusho crystals into the water and let it sit and mix. I had one spot where there was too much water - who knew, right? - so I blotted that with a paper towel, lifting what I didn't need. Then I let the whole thing dry. Ta-dah!

The last 'rule' for this week was this - after we stepped out of our comfort zone and tried something new, then we were supposed to go back and use some of our favorite tangles, our mac and cheese tangles, to complete our project. Well, I love how my first little tree turned out. I didn't want to mess it up. So, being the rebel I am, my thoughts went straight to The Pirates of the Caribbean. where Captain Hector Barbossa said the Code (of the Pirate Brethren) is more what you call guidelines, than actual rules. So. I added that quote and called it done. Hahahaha!
And because I had this blank page next to my week two page - which also sported some trees - I thought it to be a perfect fit. Last, I adhered the new page in place with some score tape.
Week Four √