Gallery Of Travel

I can't tell you how good it felt to be sitting in a clean studio working on Art Journal pages! It's such an affirmation...it kinda proves that I don't just make art to live...I also live to make art. 

And now there's an added bonus to my Art Journaling...I get to use papers from our very own scrapbooking collection. How fun is that?! 

Two quintessential Everyday is a Holiday patterns are stripes and polka dots. They have been mainstays of ours for as long as we have been making art together. Even when we were making our hand painted furniture and home decor collection...the stripes and polka dots were always key elements in the design process.

 Having these papers ready to go...hand painted stripes and polka dots, already rendered with antique washes and hand speckling...gives me such a great headstart! I feel like steps 1, 2 & 3 are already done for me, and I can move on to the juicy part of the project.

First, I honestly didn't know that I'd be sharing pics of this, being that I started early evening, and the sun was going down. Lets just say that the photography conditions were not the best. But just for the heck of it I did continue to take pics as I went along, using my iPad camera. So please excuse the terrible lighting. Really, the only lighting in the room was the warm glow emanating from a strand of circusy globe lights. So just pretend you were sitting next to me at the work table, sharing my space heater.

I truly had no plans when I sat down, except that I knew I wanted to use one of our talk/thought bubbles...namely, the one that says "Dream BIG".  I normally don't use pics of myself in my journal...but the idea of dreams are personal, and this photo felt like it fit. I had this pic in a box of photos from last winter...capturing on film a moment in our life when everything was pretty crazy. Good things and awful things occurring simultaneously. I think I snapped it while waiting in a parking lot...I'm certain that lots of serious thoughts were going through my mind at the time.

Ok, so I started off by covering a page with our pink & cream striped paper. I "Tim Holtzed" the edges. (yeah that is the only thing we call it) And rubbed a little bit of watered down pink paint to edges as well. And speckled some aqua to join my pre-speckled paper. 

I wanted to go a bit more Scrapbook-y with this page, which means that I worked a little "dryer" than I normally would. When I do that I need to bolster my elements so that they're sturdy enough to create "pile ups" (another term I use). I'm not a fan of glossy photos. I really prefer matte finish...it just has a nice soft appearance. So I made a color copy of the photo and then adhered my photocopy to card stock in order to bolster it. I did the same with my "Dream Big" bubble, and an Elle's Studio tag. Once they were firmly adhered to the card stock I then brushed a thin coat of matte gel medium over top, let dry, and then cut them out.

I love washi tape, and if you have followed our Art Journaling tutorials or if you own our book, you've surely seen that we use it often. I'm pretty much addicted to running a strip of it along an edge of a page. And I never throw out the holes that I punch out. They are perfect little confetti pops to use later!

I covered a large tag with our polka dot paper, added some aqua paint to the edges, and some random distressed texture stamping in black.

I used Aleene's Tacky Glue to adhere everything. I added a little flag cupcake topper, a gold glitter star, some stamped and cut out stars, pink sequins, and then some random stamping and doodling where it felt right.

This page really just happened on it's own. It's super simple...nothing fancy or elaborate...no crazy techniques. It's just a memory page...it's me pausing for a moment to take it in, and to consider what has happened in the past year.

Thanks bunches for popping in today! I hope you are having a great weekend! 

xo Jenny...and Aaron says hi!