For this week’s art journal page, I had a chance to play with the brand new calligraphy brushes in the store this week. They are perfect for writing with inks.
1. Start with painting your background a light colour as you will be using a dark colour for your writing. I used Indian Yellow. I created a gradient colour over the page. First I painted the entire background with a very wet brush so it was only a light colouring. I then added dabs of the indian yellow paint at the top part of the page only and then with a very wet brush, I brushed the paint down the entire page back and forth from left to right.
The aim is to basically use most of the paint on the top section and by the time you’ve reached brushing the middle section there is much less paint available on your paint brush so the colour covering is much lighter.
You can see the page below where the yellow colouring is darkest at the top and lighter in the middle and bottom.
2. I painted some white paint lightly over some very large bubble wrap I had on hand.
Bubble wrap ‘stamped’ on the page.
3. I then used a calligraphy brush and liquitex ink to write the word “heart” over the entire page. The calligraphy brush is great for writing with the liquitex acrylic ink as it soaks the ink up which means you don’t run out of ink so quickly which can happen when trying to write with paint. The calligraphy brush also holds its shape alot better than most standard paint brushes so that your writing can be more rounded and controlled with less brush strokes appearing.
4. I then used a Prima large heart foam stamp and stamped some heart images over the top using Paynes Gray and red paint.
5. I then painted inside the heart with white gesso. I ran around the outline of the white gesso heart with charcoal and smudged a lined edge. I also added some faux black stitching around the inner shape of the heart. I also added a small rubon word “loved” to the centre of the heart.
Completed page!
- Art Journal is a weekly BB Blog feature posted each Friday.
