Art Recipe Wednesday: Autumn Landscape or poetry of disintegration? (2024)

Hi my dear friends - I hope you had a great week.
I was as busy as always (looks like I'm a master of filling my time right to the top or even over!) - teaching classes, organizing next events and planning projects, posts and activities for the nearest future... including Art Recipe for Wednesday of course!

This time I decided to go bolder both with texture and color creating something a bit more abstract. I know how careful I have to be doing that as I am a huge fan of negative space and organizing elements into nice looking piles, groups and clusters and there is a risk I won't really like the final effect if I will go too crazy. To avoid the problem I decided to focus just on 3 main colours of the project - deep pinks, brown and green - with a bit of gold on the top.

Autumn feeling? Yes, please!
For me Autumn is pure the abundance of texture and colour: green changing into browns, reds, oranges, yellows - and smell of grass, soil and leaves...

There's some majestic beauty in this ending of the Summer, fading glory, hint of nostalgia and poetry of disintegration. Somehow - I could see these subtle emotions in the photo of one of my husband's ancestors and that's how this page happened. Very accurate, I believe.
Is it possible the older I get the stronger I can feel this "autumn's vibe"?

You can see I used 2 different stencils and Light Paste to create part of the texture in my project - I just love the spongy, marshmallow effect it creates! Other elements are findings from my table top: some gems, Art Ingredients - glass beads (surely the leftovers from the pendant madness I was posting last week) and random leftovers of chipboard, veil resist canvas and fabric tape. Somehow - all that put together and colored with sprays, watercolor pencils and a bit of Inka Gold was able to create interesting, rich in layers and tones journal spread. (And no black this time! How is it possible?)

Anyway - here is Art Recipe for Autumn Journal Page

and simple step-by-step tutorial for you!

Step-by-step:

1. I've started priming the pages of my old book journal with 2 coats of Art Basics Heavy White Gesso. I like its thick consistence - old paper does not crumple that much when you brush it on. I dried one coat with heating tool and continued with second one. It is great medium to work on - it prevents your inks, paints and any other mediums from soaking in your surface.

2. When White Heavy Gesso was dry I used first, more bold stencil and applied Art Basics Light Paste with palette knife on the chosen parts of my pages. I started adding layers of fabric tape, canvas, lace and glass beads right away - Light Paste (as well as Soft Gels, 3D gels and Modleing Paste) works great as an adhesive.Wherever needed I was using Soft Gloss Gel in a precise tip bottle to add more elements.

3. I dried my Light Paste with heating tool - it turned into white, light, spongy texture which reminds me marshmallows. I decided to create custom rich gold version of my Light Paste and use it with other stencil, to create more rich, interesting effect. I took 2 scoops of Light Paste into small bowl and added a bit of Silks - Acrylic Glazes: Solar Gold and and Ginger Peach. After mixing the color was deep and the shimmer looked just beautiful in my custom paste! I added one more - gold - layer on my project and dried it with heating tool. I was ready for spraying...

4. This time I was giving a test to my new Lindy's Sprays (Rusty Lantern Green and Van Dyke Sepia) and a bit of my favorite Black Orchid Pigment mixed with water - but you can surely replace Lindy's with Wild Vine and Autumn Butternut and get very similar effects! I added my photo, some embellishments - a bit of crystals and cogs I found in one of my boxes and add some final spraying...

5. When the pages were dry I wanted to add some finishing touches to the color: I used my watercolor pencils (Royal Talens) but I didn't touch them with water at all. Adding a bit of color here and there was enough to add more balance to the page - I focused mostly on green and dark pink outlining the texture done with paste and stencil or adding more definition to the colors.

6. Finally I added the finishing sparkle to the page rubbing a bit of Inka Gold (Green and Gold) on my beads, lace and embellishments. After 5 minutes my journal page was ready!