Saturday Step x Step - Journal cover

Hello ! Welcome to today's step x step, it's Sue here and I'm back to show you how I put together a journal cover for the 'Holiday Hues' challenge. The book I wanted to cover was orange when I started and I guess that this triggered where I wanted to go with the colour palette.

First of all I cut a piece of thick white card to fit the front cover. Creating on a seperate piece I find easier especially when it comes to stamping.

I tore up pieces of dictionary paper and glued them randomly over the card, trimming back the edges, and making sure that the whole thing had a coat of Glue 'n' Seal. This does what it says in it's name and seals the paper so when the next layers are paint are added the paper doesn't disintegrate. 

Using a baby wipe I blended the autumnal colours of acrylic paints over the cover. The baby wipe allows you to blend different colours together without leaving any streak lines.

To make the cover look aged I used more acrylic paint with the baby wipe and rubbed it around the edges.

Using the Tim Holtz Tiles stencil I stencilled around the 2 opposite corners first of all with brown acrylic paint, then I 'bumped' the stencil and went over the top with a pale green acrylic paint. This creates a subtle shadow and also gives the effect of 3D.

I stencilled with the Tim Holtz Wild Flower stencil keeping it subtle as I wanted this layers to almost disappear into the background, but not quite, so that it added depth.

The lovely dandelion stamp is by Impression Obsession and I've stamped using Potting Soil Archival ink, building on the layers.

Now to bring an image more to the forefront of the design, I stamped the Poppies stamp from Yvonne Blair Designs by Impression Obsession then painted the flower heads using acrylic paints that are translucent, this allows the layers and more importantly the text from the dictionary paper, to show through.

You'll notice I added a further poppy to the left, this was done by masking off the rest of the stamp so one single flower could be stamped. I then needed to add some stamping to tie everything together, the Tim Holtz Ledger Script stamped with Potting Soil Archival ink was just the ticket !

When I do any design I always think in 3 levels, background, middle and foreground. So now I was happy with the background and middle I needed to work on the foreground. The beautiful flowers from Wendy Vecchi's Artful Life were the perfect solution! I painted some white card first of all then stamped several flowers and painted them, again using acrylic paint and then cut them out.

I arranged the flowers on the front and for the 2 lowers ones I cut up one flower and layered the top part on one flower and the lower part on the other. I think you can just about see it on the above. I then used a Stabilo pencil and a damp paintbrush to create a shadow around the flowers.

The final thing to do was to add a sentiment and the recent addition to The Funkie Junkie Boutique of the Impression Obsession stamps by Yvonne Blair have made me very happy! The sentiments are fabulous and I eventually settled on the one above (mainly because it sat very nicely in the space I had!) Actually there was one more thing that I did and that was to use Wendy Vecchi's gold embossing paste and rub it around the edges with my finger. It gives a really lovely golden, aged sheen!

You can see how the flowers are layered up on the above photo.

One last photo to share with you which shows the wonderful sentiment.

I hope you've enjoyed today's step x step as much as I enjoyed creating it!

Sue
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