Laundry

The Art Journal journey challenge theme for July is "in my garden there is...". I ran into this quote at the beginning of this month and decided to do laundry in my garden, after all it's summer and we love to hang the laundry outside. I am also entering the Country View July challenge (have fun with circles) and the Paperartsy colour mixing challenge.

This became gloomier than I thought, but considering all the nasty racist talk going on all over the western world, perhaps the dark grey is in place. Actually our laundry has been hanging in the sunshine lately. I started the background with my 6x6 gelli plate black and white paints, bubble wrap and a brayer. My gelli plate is on an acrylic block, so I can use it like a stamp on my journal. Then I continued with some stamps. I brayered paint on the plate, used it to "ink" my stamps and stamp on the page and always drew the print too. The stamps are from Ellen Vargo and the Everything Art series. Some numberstamping with Archival ink and a ledger from an Ink and the Dog stamp too, and my "garden" was done.

Colour mixing isn't quite my cup of tea, but I felt inspired by Hazels post on the Paperartsy blog where she used just two colours at a time for her combinations. Black and white was easy enough, but other combinations didn't all prove so easy... I drew a set of gelli prints, each with some relatively close colours... there where spots I didn't like, but the way the pink and blue prints merge is quite pleasing. This sheet was cut into "clothes". I actually did consider cutting shirts and trousers, but decided to go for an abstract pillowcase kind of look :)

Here's the finished page again. I wrote the sentiment with a calligraphy marker, but the black wasn't black enough and I had to colour over it with a black pen. I also added a touch of highlights in white. I do believe the writing is actually straight, but my journal is starting to be so full it looks wonky in pictures :) If I could change something, I'd place the "is" after the "colour", but I can live with this... but perhaps I'll do some shading around those pillowcases to make them pop more!