{Art from the Heart} Page Gallery & Prompt #2

Here is the page I created for the first "Art from the Heart" prompt, featuring one of my favorite quotes by Eleanor Roosevelt. It's funny-- I have written down several quotes in the first few weeks of this year, and almost all of them contain the words "experience" and "adventure." I had even set my iPhone background to this quote from the To Resolve Project. Then we find out we'll be spending the majority of the year in Ireland and will be able to travel extensively through Europe. I'm not much into the law of attraction concept, but I do think our minds are powerful things and that we tend to seek out situations and opportunities that match whatever our minds are focusing on at the time. Pretty amazing.

Here was my general process for creating the page:
 1. Gesso the page (as described in my Art Journal Kit post, gesso is a primer that helps prepare your page for paint).
2. Drop three different colors of acrylic paint on the page and blend with your fingers. I like to keep different colors in separate areas of the page, and blend just a little bit so that they don't get too muddled.

3. After the paint dries for a minute or two, rub the page lightly with your fingers or a clean rag. This will rub off sporadic areas of paint and create the white splatter effect that you see above.
4. Use gel matte medium to create an image transfer (the section of pattern that is in the upper left in the photo below). I can go into more details about gel transfers later, but I used the same general process as the wood portrait I made a few months ago.

5. Cut out collage imagery from magazines or print an image from online. I wanted to be able to use this flower from Yoga Journal magazine more than once, so I first scanned it into my computer so I will always have a digital copy of it and then printed it on regular computer paper. Once printed, I cut it out with small scissors.
6. I used India ink to paint the quote on the page, and left blanks for certain words that I wanted to stamp onto the page using my alphabet set. After the India ink was dry, I stamped those words in using a black stamp pad.
7. I added a few dollops of paint and used some old caps and a toilet paper tube as stamps to make circles on the page.
8. To be determined: Since I'm rarely 100% done with my pages, I still might add some small writing at the  top of the page, perhaps about our Ireland trip, and perhaps a few more layers of patterns in the top right corner.

Reader Contributions:

Page by Amanda from Got Curls, with lyrics from Home by Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros

Page by Marcia from Art by Marcia Beckett, with lyrics by The Red Hot Chili Peppers

Thank you for your contributions, ladies! I loved seeing your own interpretations of the prompt :)


Now on to Prompt #2... I again invite anyone who is inspired to send me images of your pages that you create in response to the prompt {email: CaitididDesigns [at] gmail [dot] com}, and I'll feature all submissions on Wednesday, February 15th.