Thursday, March 27, 2014

Gifts of Imperfection - last journal prompts

I am just finishing up the last of the journal prompts that Brene provided us to work on as in interim activity between Part 1 and Part 2 of her Ecourse - The Gifts of Imperfection which is being offered by Oprah on her website.  It has been fun to create arty pages on which to work the substance of the journaling for the prompts.
I hand lettered the titles on these pages using a fine tip Sharpie and added colour afterwards.  This time around I decided to use my new set of watercolour crayons by Stampin UP!!  The regal collection!
I had only seen these demonstrated before but when they were on clearance I decided to give them a try. They are solid watercolour crayons and therefore a very cost effective source of watercolour.  They are very creamy, vibrant and are easily watered down without getting too runny.  They are a little more opaque than my current palette of watercolour - a kid's set I bought years ago.  I really love all the colours in this set and will use them a lot.
On the first page I just rubbed the pencils onto the page and brushed on water with a foam brush.
Not my favorite way of using these crayons.  I found the strokes were too visible for my liking.  I used a watercolour paint brush to fill in around the letters of my title and I liked that much better.  I just wet my brush, wiped it across the end of the crayon and applied to my cardstock.  For page two I just used my brush to flick paint from the end of the crayon - a little trick I discovered as I was applying paint to my brush for the first page.  I used several colours of green to fill my FAITH word.  I used the leftover paint in my brush from the first title to colour the title on this page.  As you can see, the watercolour is easily watered down and still gives a nice depth of colour.  On my third page, I started by adding colour to my title and then remembered reading about a transfer technique using Sheer Heaven on the Whatever . . . Whenever blog.  I do not have any Sheer Heaven but I did have a few small pieces of vellum on my desk so I used that.  I just scribbled or drew on the vellum and applied the coloured side of the vellum to my damp cardstock. It transfers nicely.  The wetter the paper the more your transfer has a watercolour look. Too wet and it just makes a blob of colour, on drier paper you get more definition. Your paper does require to be dampened to get a transfer of colour of any kind.
So, Part 2 of the course starts next week and I am looking forward to getting back to the material from the book.  I am sharing with my Book Club friends from out east using Skype which has been lots of fun!!

Therese