Art Journalling

I have been teaching the children some different techniques to make backgrounds for their art journals as they always seem to get stuck on this.  These ones we made by spraying different coloured inks onto a page and then spraying over them with water to help them blend.  We then used stencils to make the 'watermark' kind of patters; you just lay down the stencil and then spray over with water.  You then 'dab' off the water with kitchen role and there you have it.  This just amazed the kids and they loved the effects they came up with.  The kids use cheap scrapbooks from the £1 shop for their journalling so we have to gesso the page first so that the the ink [or whatever medium you use] isn't absorbed into the paper.  Actually, whatever paper we use we gesso it first.

We used ready made inks for our backgrounds but you can make your own using the little bit of ink that is always left in your printer cartridges when you change them [how annoying is that?].  Just mix a little bit with water and put it in a pump spray; you can add mica [the shiney stuff] from make up or the craft shop if you want it to have glimmer.  You can mix different amounts of all the colours to make any colour at all... we learned all this from a fantastic crafting lady on You Tube and you can check out her video here.  It will be worth it as these sprays cost a fortune.  I think though if you want the 'glimmer' to stick to the page you need to add a tiny amount of glue but I think that this lady said it may 'go off' after a while.

Sorry these pics are not great because of the reflections bouncing off the glimmer in the ink sprays but I think you will get the idea of the effect inshaAllah.

Crush put a compass and fleur de lis in this background as he wants to use it for his cub scout stuff.

Daisy also chose the fleur de lis but wanted to make her page about the family - obviously a work in progress!

This is Sprites 2nd page - this time he spread gesso through the stencil to give a raised, textured effect.  He wants this page to be about time inshaAllah.

This is Sprites finished page.  He's not too happy with it but I think it looks great.

This is another page in Daisy's journal.  I think I have showed this before but she insisted it go on again and I do hate to disappoint her lol!