Poppy Play for Art Journal Everyday

  It's Friday already and time to share the spread I did in the paper journal I use to brush off, spray off or stencil off any extra mediums I have from a project I was working on. Ahhh, this one I remember well. I had pretty much brown acrylic paint left on my palette from another project and tho I don't particularly like dark colors I didn't want to waste the paint. I opened to a spread that already had some bright color on it so I thought OK if I brush a border all around it it won't be so bad....WRONG!

  Here's what  the ugly spread looked like:

  Funny how when life happens and I get stressed I just want to splatter and play with abandon...the best therapy one can have, besides some really special friends :) Anyhow, I opened to these pages, grabbed at a bunch of acrylics and gesso and transformed it to this:

 
   I used a handful of Golden's acrylics -Transparent Pyrole Orange, Quinacridone Crimson, Cerulean Blue Chromium and Turquois(Pthalo), along with white gesso. Several drops of each color were randomly applied over the pages along with drops of gesso. I simply used my fingers to spread it all around. Cleaned off my messy hands to take the pic and allowed this to dry a few min.

  When visiting Dina Wakely's blog not long ago she posted a  really wonderful series of brightly collaged and painted pages from a book she made. Besides all the fun colors, she used a bunch of really fab quotes/ sayings that I knew I had to use as  great jump starts for a journal page. You can see her pages beginning here ; just scroll further down to see the others. I had a page of them already typed and printed so I just grabbed one to use- "Let us lay in the sun and count every beautiful thing we can see." All I could think of was the beauty of my favorite flower-the red oriental poppies, especially as I was organizing some photos and had just come across this one which I took of our neighbors flowers in bloom in the Spring.

  
   So I threw caution to the wind, got out some green acrylic paint, Golden Pyrrole Red, watercolor crayons and oil pastels and hoped my attempt at some loose finger painting  would result in somewhat  recognizable poppies.

   Here is a close up of one of the poppies:

   First I put some dots of green acrylic paint along the bottom edges of the pages, spritzed with some water, then held the book up to allow the green to drip from the bottom a bit. I used some of those drips to be the stems of my flowers. I used a stencil and yellow acrylic paint at the top left of the spread to make the "sun". I finger painted white gesso circles where I wanted the flowers, let dry, then finger painted over it with the red acrylic. I watered down some of the red and made some splatters over the pages. Black oil pastel was used for the flower centers. You can see the softness and dimension you get when just using your fingers. Along the bottom I added a combination of green watercolor crayons and oil pastels to form leaves and grass and deepen the stem drips a bit.
The quote was added and here is the end result:

    Sorry, the photo isn't as sharp as I would have liked. I may do a bit more with it yet but for now I am so happy those hideous brown pages are gone!
I'm linking this up to Julie Balzer's Art Journal Everyday. Although I don't necessarily link up every week it's a really great way to take the time to play and share the inspiration.

  Speaking of inspiration, you simply must visit my friend Frieda Oxenham's blog!! Besides being an international award winning quilter (her quilts and designs absolutely blow me away!!) and mixed media artist, Frieda takes without a doubt THE most gorgeous photographs of flowers and of museums, cemeteries and the like in her native Scotland. It's a place definitely on my bucket list.

  Til next time...wishing you warmth and sunshine!

    "Odd how the creative power at once brings the whole universe to order." Virginia Woolfe