For my playtime this last Friday (sitting in the hallway during my son's taekwondo class), I thought I'd play a bit with the credit card background technique that quirky artist suggested last week. It really couldn't be simpler to squeeze a line of paint onto a page and then drag it down with a credit card! The hardest thing for me was finding some scrap paper to put underneath the page to catch the excess around the edges. I ended up using paper towels from the girls' bathroom. Even though the paint was just Liquitex acrylic tubes that came with a tabletop easel w/drawer that I got last year, the color is still vivid and fun. Making sure to really scrape the paint down so that there's no thickness left on the page meant that the pages don't stick together. I *love* the way the water droplets affect the page--they look ghostly, ethereal, fairy-like.
The blue-green page is done in the Canson XL Mix Media notebook, and the yellow one is in the Strathmore Visual Journal--Mixed Media notebook.
A couple of weeks ago, while my mom was visiting, I got some heirloom apples from Central Market--first time I've seen them there. They were really delicious--seemed to have more of the essence of apple, somehow. I went back for more and picked up a couple of their handouts because I liked the way they looked. They were getting wrinkled and damaged in my bag, though, so I decided to just go ahead and put one of them on the cover of my Moleskin journal (too pretty to hide away on the inside). I'll put paint and other stuff on top of it when I get a chance, but at least I got the page itself on. Used Mod Podge since that's what I carry out with me, and applied it quite thinly with a palette knife. It makes me want to eat an apple just looking at it!
