Not so Messy Monochrome

Hello and welcome.

I have been in somewhat of a creative slump lately and not spent much time in my craft room, but I have been enjoying the delights of YouTube and the hours of amazing videos of other people's creativity. Just entering "mixed media" in the search box has turned up loads of inspiration and some interesting artists.

One in particular is Jennibellie and I have decided to join her Journal Workshop ning site. One of the groups on the site is the Monthly Challenge and the challenge for this month is to create a messy monochrome art journal spread with the use of a maximum of two highlight colours.

OK - so as my post title suggests, I didn't score too highly on the messy part of the challenge - but this is where the inspiration took me, and after such a dry spell, I went with it...

The background is Dylusions Black Marble, and, although you can barely see it there are also random stampings of various Kaiser Craft texture stamps in Jet Black StazOn. Additional texture was added by flicking water splashes on the Dylusions and then picking up the colour with kitchen towel.

The trees are white and green acrylic paint and applied thorough the Crafter's Workshop  TCW171 Tree of Life template. The green tree was outlined with charcoal pencil and over painted with Cosmic Shimmer Meadow Lush mist to give a hint of shimmer.

I'm making a real effort to do some stash busting this year so I've used letter stickers from my stash for the page title. The white letters are American Craft Remarks "Sarah Script" and the green letters are Making Memories green Puffy Alphas. I coloured over the Puffy Alphas with Promarkers to try and match the green to the tree a little better (It changed colour from a yellow green when I applied the shimmer mist).

Finishing touches were to outline the white letters with a fine black pen, outline the green letters with white ink, apply watered down white acrylic splashes over the whole page (masking the green tree first), draw a line and dots border around the page with a Posca paint pen and finally add three die cut felt bird embellishments.

It isn't a messy monochrome but I'm really pleased to have felt creative again!

Thanks for looking.