Another journal page using my new wooden block stamps – they work so well with the Dylusions paint. It’s just the right consistency to cover the stamp, stick to the page, and not squidge everywhere. Unfortunately it wasn’t quite the same when I used rubber stamps, which squeezed the paint away giving me the tramline outline that I then had to fill in with a paintbrush.
More block printing with my new wooden blocks – this time in Dylusions Crushed Grape and White Linen acrylic paints over a brown/pink/orange acrylic paint background. I’ve added shading with water-soluble graphite and Vintage Photo/Walnut Stain Distress Inks. The text is drawn freehand with Signo Broad white gel pen and embellished with the fine tip version.
The spacing of everything is unplanned when I start… it just so happened that four of the blocks fitted in the height of the page, and the fold breaks the pattern and fools the eye, so it’s not immediately obvious there’d have been an overlap if it had been on a flat sheet of A4. I printed the vertical white framing first, and then spaced the horizontal accordingly. How I manage to fit in the text whilst worrying (ha!) that I’m going to miss out a letter or misspell the word is beyond me, but I seemed to have managed it.
I’ve just taken delivery of a set of wooden fabric printing blocks, a commercial take on the carved versions typically seen in India/Indonesia. As well as printing onto fabric, of course they’re suited to printing onto paper as well, and what better way of using them than in an art journal? This page is in my Moleskine journal that has been somewhat unloved since starting art journaling in 2011. I already had a pink/purple background in place, and I augmented this with some dabs of Dylusions paint. The image transfer of some heuchera leaves was also already on the page, and I’ve blended the edges with some more paint as well as adding a smear of orange to colour. The block prints can be seen in purple and white at the borders. I was quite pleased with the right side especially, as the paint acted more as a glue, pulling off previous paint layers creating a serendipitous distress effect. The text is free-drawn in Signo white pigment pen and outlined with a fine black pigment pen, except for the final two words which I traced so that it was a little more ‘special’. For hand-drawn text, I found the book Hand Lettering: Simple, Creative Styles for Cards, Scrapbooks & More by Marci Donley and DeAnn Singh really useful as something to bounce off. We’ll be using the blocks in the Art Journaling Session on 3rd August, for which one place is still available to book here.