Hi! Welcome to my page. I made this art journal page for the ECD (Elizabeth Craft Designs) Planners & Journaling June prompt, “pastels”.
I haven’t used my gel plates in a long time and this seemed like a fun project to play with them. To start, I cut paper masks using the ECD Stemmed Flowers dies. Then I applied blue, and a bit of green, acrylic paint to a gel plate with a brayer and placed the flower masks over the paint. The print was pulled with mixed media paper. I like the way that the masks created white silhouettes on the background.
I cut Canson watercolor paper with flowers and leaves from the Florals Mini’s set then painted the blooms purple with watercolors.
Do you ever use your dies in reverse? I didn’t want all of the flower stems to look exactly the same, so, I used one of the stems flipped over. The die on the left (above) is lying face-up while the die-cut on the right is upside down. Since the edges of the upside down die look “rough”, I used a nail file to sand the grain of the paper toward what is now the back. It isn’t perfect, but it really helps to smooth the edges.
After I painted and then glued the flower stems in place, the effect was too busy and none of the flowers stood out. Adding orange dots to the centers of the top flowers helped to create some variety and interest in the top stem of flowers. That also visually separate them from the flowers underneath.
The boxed Journal Phrases are a playful way to add sentiments and helped to ground the flowers so they didn’t look as if they were floating. And, that’s all there is to it.
Thanks for dropping by! I’d enjoy it if you’d leave a comment.
Di
- Supplies
- ECD Stemmed Flowers
- ECD Florals Mini’s
- Journal Phrases 1
- ECD Watercolors
- Canson Watercolor Paper
- Gel plate
- Acrylic paint
a little birdie told me.... 