Friday, August 19, 2011

Indian Summer Splendor

Page in my Little Gluebook of Wisdom art journal
I finally did one of the challenges over at Use It Tuesday. I was supposed to create something with Indian Summer in mind. First reaction: I WISH! But, I went with it, probably hoping it would make me sweat less.
I thought, wonder what late summer colors go together...what medium sounds fun to work in...and what was that idea I had when I read Beate's resist technique in a recent Splitcoast Stampers newsletter? For some freakish reason, this got me going!

Pulled this color wheel out of my plastic paper keeper that holds all my wheels. It was the complementary ranges from The Color Wheel Company. I was thinking greens and purples. And this wheel helped me add oranges, so my colors are complementary triads.

My *cheap* Loew-Cornell watercolors were calling out to me, and since they've got a lot of different hues, I said, come on down to play.

Now, to the technique idea. It came to me that I wanted to try using my Pentel fine point Corrector White-Out Pen as a resist. Whenever I thought about it, I was using markers to color, but call me fickle.

So, I drew some tall grass freehand with the pen. Very easy to do. Dried quickly. Awesome for resist, actually. Will use it again. Painted the grass. I collected some orange and purple papers from my scraps and stamped them with a harlequin script background from Stampers Best with Stazon purples. Then I punched some squares with the papers and created a border.

The quotation is my freehand writing. I had seen some of the letter font style online and just winged it. I put a piece of graph paper underneath a piece of vellum, and wrote on the vellum with a purple Micron. I had pencilled the quote on the graph paper so that I basically just copied it. That always makes me feel more secure, less stress.

I have liked the quote ever since seeing the movie Splendor in the Grass years ago. This particluar pasage is quoted at the movie's beginning and also in a classroom scene, so it got my attention. As soon as the idea came to me to draw grass, that's the quote I wanted to use.

Everything about creating this page was fun, with just one thing not exactly perfect. I finished last night and was planning to post this morning after I saw that my page was dry and flat, and ready to scan in. So I go over to the challenge site and they'd already closed the challenge. Oh well, no biggie, really. I wasn't trying to compete or win a prize, just going along with a good idea and participating. And I hope to do it again. I like that I can choose the size and type of what I create, so I can fit it into my to-do list if I have to.

Speaking of lists, someone I know needs to start cleaning off a desk and a chifferobe...