Bubbles in Blue

Here is one last background for awhile.

11" x 14" Strathmore Bristol Smooth Surface,

Dylusions Ink Spray - London Blue and White Linen.

Joggles stencil Endless.

I created the background first, with the two Dylusions colors.

Then I spritzed water through the Joggles stencil.

Not sure why the wet places lifted to a darker blue, that's one of the nice things about these inks. 

You never know what you are going to get!

Butterfly Magic

Lately I have been working on backgrounds. Lots of backgrounds. They are such fun! This is what I'm working on today, the day after Thanksgiving. I passed up Black Friday shopping to stay home and make art. That's a good tradeoff anyday!

A few posts back, I showed you some backgrounds I'd been building. This is one of them. I started with an 11" x 14" sheet of Strathmore Bristol Smooth Surface paper and two colors of Dylusions Ink Sprays. This paper handles wet media very well. You get a little curling on the edges, which can be handled with painter's tape and a heat gun. Both of which I never remember. Anyway, this is what I started with today.

Next, I took this stencil from Joggles called Flight and placed it down on my background. I used a spritzer bottle of water and sprayed water onto the openings of the stencil.

Let that sit for about 15-20 seconds, then carefully lift off your stencil. Let the water sit on the surface another 15-20 seconds, then take a paper towel and blot the remaining wetness off the paper. You will notice the wetness lifted some of the color making those areas lighter. It won't work this way with all inks, I used Dylusions Ink Sprays and they work this way wonderfully.

A little blast from a heat gun with complete the drying process. Here is a close up of some of the butterflies. A totally different look for my background from what I started with.

Then I chose this butterfly to work with. 

Zentangle® is a really awesome art style that can be adapted to so many other types of art. I wanted to do something special with this butterfly. I started with the body and began drawing in some betweed. Perfect fit for a body.

From there I added a modified version of mooka for antennae, and started filling in a couple areas on the wings. Not any specific tangle pattern at this point, just filling in lines until I decided which direction to go in.

I went with a really loose version of Carole Ohl's tangle inapod, which I love. There are so many opportunities to use this pattern! And it works on wings!

And I kept adding patterns until I reached this point. You can see a bit more mooka at the top, then I used a version of Kathy Barringer's Up and Down, a little of Sandy Hunter's cruffle for the 'eyes' on the wings (I swear I'm obsessed with this tangle,) and finished with some auras and a little shading. I liked the butterfly at this point, but it still needed something. 

I was thinking it needed a little bling! A little sparkle! So I pulled out my At You Spica pens that come from Copic and got busy.

Sadly, I could not get my picture-taking-machine-AKAiphone to do justice to this color! The sparkly, shiny, glittery awesomeness that is the At You Spica pen is wonderful! Yellow, orange, red, pink (of course!), purple, and gold. So beautiful in real life. Not too shabby here. Now, on to the other butterflies before they all take flight and make a break for it. Unless they want some extra bling before they go :).

Making Backgrounds

I ran across a video on pinterest showing the use of Derwent Intense Pencils and Blocks to create background pages for your art journal. I  really like the bright, "intense" colors you could get with these pencils and blocks - so I ordered some and they arrived a couple days ago.

They are super easy to use. For the first set of pages I used a total of 4 colors - a magenta, a teal, a neon green, and a purple. I used the pencils first and colored some different colored splotches on the 2-page spread. Then I took a wet brush and just pulled the colors around, mixing them in places, leaving them alone in others. I held the book up and let some of the colors run across the page, then I used a heat gun to dry the colors. In a couple damp places, I used a scrunched up paper towel to blot - which made a grid-like design. You can see it best in the first photo, right hand page, in the purple section. 


On the second set of pages, I used 3 colors - aqua, orange, and yellow. I used a wet brush to push and pull color back and forth. Then on all the pages, I spritzed a little of Tsukineko's Sheer Shimmer Spritz in copper and frost. You can't really see that on these pictures - it gives the pages a light sparkly look.


I still need to try the Derwent Intense Blocks. My daughter played with those some this afternoon. Here's a link to the video. Enjoy!