Textured gesso and stamping.

The prompt for this week at DLP was to ride your own unique spirit so I chose spirit as my inspiration. The challenge was to make a custom element so I decided to do a textured background.

I started by laying a stencil over my page and scraping thick gesso over it. You could use texture paste if you wanted to.

After I removed the stencil I used the palette knife to apply more gesso across the bottom and pressed the stencil into it so I would get a slightly different look.

 I used a heat gun while the gesso was wet to make bubbles. Where the gesso is thin you will get smaller bubbles. Here you can see the large bubbles in the thicker areas of gesso. Make sure you do this in a well ventilated area. You do not want to inhale the fumes from the heated gesso. I usually do it near an open window or outside.

At this stage only the top layer of gesso has dried so when you let it cool and then press the bubbles down you get a more textured effect. I then usually let the gesso dry for 10 minutes before continuing. 

Next I used acrylic paint to color the page. I used aqua and white for the top and blended that into a bronze metallic paint at the bottom.

The metallic paint wasn't very shiny so I added some copper colored Viva Inka-gold over the textured area. It doesn't show up in the photo well but it makes the texture stand out more. 

I used bubble wrap to apply green paint to the background for visual interest. I stamped dandelions using stazon ink.

The stamped flower stems were too small so I used a brown sharpie to make them longer. Notice how I didn't make all  the stems reach the bottom of the page. I also wanted the flower centers to be darker so I used the marker for that too. If your stamping doesn't come out dark enough it is ok to go over it with markers. You are in control of your journal. 

I wrote the quote on tracing paper first to make sure it would fit into the space I wanted then used a copper pen to add it to my page. This whole page only took me just over 1 hour to do. It is very typical of my style of clean backgrounds and colors I love.