Feeling Blue?

Hello there, Podgy here with you today. Yesterday I went to our dear friend Florence's for an arty afternoon. I was going to blog the whole day in photos but guess what? I forgot the camera!!! Silly me.

Anyway, Florence had suggested we should spend our time together creating in our journals, and she showed me an interesting background technique. She instructed me to pick one or two pastel chalks to blend into each other, and as I'd read of a blue challenge on this week's Fussy and Fancy challenge blog, my colours were easily decided; two shades on blue, and white to blend and lighten.

The blank pages were covered with gesso, dried with a heat gun, then coloured randomly with my chosen pastel chalks, blending each colour into the other lightly. I then gessoed over this and brayered over the page to 'fix' the pastels, and stop them bleeding into any further inks or sprays I wanted to add.

On top of the gesso and ink effect goes just about anything you want. I used masks which had Dylusions and Distress ink sprayed through, the inked negative of the stencil, some background stamps of butterflies and text, flower stamps.... This is a 'don't think, just create' kind of page, too much thinking makes a bear less creative.

Here I am with my page



My inspiration, as well as coming from the Fussy and Fancy blue challenge, came from hearing a cover of Never Tear us Apart, sung by one of my favourite singers, Paloma Faith. There's a particular line I love - ' we all have wings, but some of us don't know why'.

Along with the aid of a chipboard butterfly, which I misted with blue glimmer mist then mod-podged and scattered with a lovely blue glitter supplied by Florence, I printed out lyrics on Florence's computer, and borrowed her lovely swirly alphabet stamps to print the word WINGS. I also die cut two butterflies from book pages, and rubbed them over with some blue metallic rub on, which left the text showing through. I found some lovely flower stamps in Florence's stash and used those on the bottom of the pages, just for added interest.



Here is a close up of the lefthand page



And one of the righthand side



I had such fun creating this page. You know how much the bears love our challenges, it makes crafting so much more fun, that and sharing with friends. What a wonderful day. :)

Hopefully, next month, the bears will have a new phone, with a better camera on, enabling us to take crisper, clearer close-ups for you all, but for now,alas,we have run out of pocket money, so the pics we take on here will have to suffice.


With love from the bears.