Wanderlust 2021 - Week 4 with Shay Michelle

Hello art friends!  No you did not miss my week 3, I decided to skip it and move on to week 4.  Week 3 was a self portrait and it was going to be extremely difficult for me to do that one.  Maybe some day.  

Week 4 was a lot of fun.  We used watercolor in an unconventional way and Shay showed us a really cool technique.  I tried the technique, but I didn't do something right and I didn't get the same results Shay did.  But my attempts resulted in a layout I kinda like.  So not all was lost!

I can't want to share Shay's technique from her class, since it's a paid class.  But I can tell you Shay challenged us to work with a dandelion as a focal point.  And our theme was still Reflection with Shay's twist - Wishes.

I ended up going in a little bit of different direction as far as the artistic part of the layout though.  For the base I started with blue watercolor paint over gesso.  When Shay's technique didn't pan out for me I decided to try again, by adding some purple paint and I like how the background turned out .... Serendipity!

I started out adding the stems and centers with a brown acrylic paint pen, then used a white acrylic paint pen to start drawing lines out from the center.  Then added little "v's" along those lines.  I added some glitter glue along some of the lines.  While that was drying I used a script stamp and Whisper White "craft" ink by Stampin' Up.  Then I sprayed both pages with "Workable Fixitive".  I wanted to set everything so I could add more layers if I wanted to without reactivating the water color background.   

At this point the white acrylic paint of my dandelions was not showing up as well as I wanted.  I added a little purple between the lines, another layer of white.  After the paint dried, I added some darker lines with a charcoal pencil.  This one is really hard to explain.  Video would definitely make mores sense.

I hand wrote the title on tissue paper and used water to tear away around each word.  That aloud me to move the words around and figure out the placement.  I also stamped the little girl on tissue paper.  I used matte medium to adhere them down.

Hope your inspired!

Melisa

SUPPLIES

Watercolor paints, acrylic paint pens, glitter glue, charcoal pencil

Stamped image of little girl from my stash - really old and discontinued