Flower power journal page by Nicole Austin
Often, I will start off with a background in my art journal that already has leftover paint or something started on the background.
This page started off with some various paint colors (Robin’s Egg, Azalea, and Hot Coral all from Handmade Modern, plus a little purple acrylic paint and white over the top after the first layer is dry.) If you’re starting from a blank page, try taking a few colors and scraping them onto the background. Or you can find a “blah” page or a page that you are not super happy with. When the paint layer is dry, play with the oil pastels and scribble some marks and simple shapes and collage some flowers and patterned tissue paper onto the background. Add some splatters with the acrylic ink and some spray ink through stencils randomly around the page.
At this point, you are just playing with colors and getting inspiration for the final layers. Plus, this is a great way to create your own collage paper by using scrap papers to mop up any of the drips and to stamp the wet stencils onto. Add the stickers, paint markers and color in some of the flowers with the NeoColor crayons. Then add the acrylic paint by lightly dipping your fingers in a bit of paint and tapping and spreading the paint around the page. You can also use a sponge for this part if you don’t like to finger paint but I encourage you to try it! You get a really nice texture with fingerpainting and it’s sometimes a little easier to control. Add “leaves” by making little heart shapes around the page next to each flower and also add some acrylic paint pen over the tops of the collage flowers. Use black acrylic paint for the insides of the flowers and drip some acrylic ink for the stems.
Try adding some patterned napkins in between the flowers to vary the background a bit. Add some stamped letters to say whatever is in your heart. For me, “Flower Power” popped in my head, so it had to go on the page! Overall, just have fun and play around.
I hope you enjoyed this week’s Crash the Stash–I can’t wait to see what you create!
Products Used:
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- Stencils: Doodle Leaves, Garden 2
- Collage Sheets: Collage Pak for Sunday Inspiration 11-13-16, and 7-17-16
- Art Journal (I used an 11×14” Strathmore Mixed Media Journal)
- Oil pastels
- Acrylic paint (Handmade Modern in Robin’s Egg, Azalea, Leaf, Hot Coral)
- Acrylic inks (Liquitex in Cerulean Blue and Daler Rowney FW in Fluorescent Blue, Genesis Green, and Fluorescent Pink)
- Spray ink (Dylusions & Mister Hueys)
- Stabilo marks-all pencil (black)
- Liquitex 15 mm & Sharpie Bold water-based paint pens (fluorescent pink, aqua, red, black)
- Waterbrush
- Glue stick
- Flower stickers
- Tim Holtz cling foam stamps (Cutout Lower)
- Acrylic block
- Versafine stamp ink
- Brea Reese paint writer (white & black)
- Patterned tissue paper & napkins
- Neocolor II watersoluble wax pastels (various colors)
- Grid paper (or any scrap paper to pick up wet paint, etc)
- Baby wipes
You can see more from Nicole here:
The many layers transform the piece constantly and in the end, you bring all the layers together and unify the page beautifully–amazing!
Thank you! I’m glad you enjoyed it! 🙂