Let's Journal! Pt IV

Here we are at day 4 of our 5 day tutorial. I hope that my pages have inspired you to pick up a notebook and get to work! Today we're going to add some things to the top of our page that will stand out pretty well on the finished page. These "embellishments" may include photographs, die cuts, chipboard, magazine pages, printed text, etc. Here's what I did:

I used my favorite pen to add some black doodle junk at the top and bottom of the page. I prefer these pens by Sharpie. It is hard to find a pen that continues to have great ink flow over all of these surface types. I gave up using Pitt artist pens. The tips do not hold up well to these textured pages.

In the picture above, you can see I also added text from my computer. Before printing the text, I sprayed a piece of cardstock with water and then followed with a few quick squirts of Walnut Ink. Once the paper was dry, I fed it through my computer. Instant aged text. Once the text was on the page, I outlined each piece with my black colored pencil and smudged away.

When I am gluing small pieces of cut out text to my pages, I like to use this glue pen. It's a lot easier to control the glue placement. If I were to use glue stick or gel medium, and if any of the glue stick or gel medium "missed its mark", then the pencil lines and charcoal smudges would stick to the glue and look sloppy. With this pen, I can assure that glue will only go where it needs to be.

You can see I also added some stamped script to the page. To ink the stamps, I lay the stamps down on the table, rubber side up, and gently rub the corner of a stazon ink pad to the center of the rubber. This way, the stamp will not look like a block of text, it will appear as some of the writing has weathering and worn away.

So I think I am just about finished here...time to add some journaling. How is your page coming along? When I look back at this page and remember some of the things I mentioned on day 1 of the tutorial, I can see that I am sort of a liar. Ha! I wanted my pattern paper to show through, but my paint color mishap required additional paint layers, so most of the floral is covered up. All of that extra paint also covers up a lot of the text I hoped would peek through. Oh well. It's still a nice page even though it didn't finish in the direction that I hoped for at the beginning. Like I said, there is no wrong way to make a page. All pages are great! They're your pages and when you look back at them a long time from now, you'll have forgotten the floral pattern and the text you wanted to come through.

See you tomorrow!