Hello my dear crafty friends!

My name is Irit Shalom and I am an Israeli designer who is very thrilled to be a part of Bella Crafts Creative Team. This is my first post here in the Bella BLOG and I hope my English third language is  pretty good.  Anyway, this is a full photo step by step tutorial and a very self expressing one.

This is just my second time doing art journal pages and my very first art journaling tutorial, but I think it’s just the same as doing Mixed Media canvas tutorial I am pretty much familiar.

So here we go:

Instructions:

1. Mix a 3-4 acrylics over a very thick white cardstock and just ” kiss” the paints with another cardstock to get this double spread as shown.  In between, as the paints are wet, make some “like gelli plate” mono prints over the wet paint with think printer paper and keep them for the next steps. I managed to get 4 prints from two pages and I will use one of them later.

Step one art journal with Ann Butler’s and Clearsnap products

2.Add strips of Vaseline (I think in USA they call it Petroleum) over the dry page.

Step two tutorial adding Petroleum over paint

3.Cover the entire page with a thin coat of chalkboard black paint. You can use black acrylic too, but this chalkboard paint has  a very speedy drying time, so I like it better.

Step three art journal tutorial covering paint with petroleum with black paint

4.Wipe the whole piece with dry paper towel and you will see the ” Vaseline” covered spots left non painted.

Step four of art journal tutorial – wipe black paint from petroleum covered paint

5.Take one of your so called “mono prints” and punch a few circles with 2-3 circle punches. Add the punched circles over the dry piece and glue with gel medium over them.  This is your chance to use “leftovers” and you can see how beautiful those “mono prints” are.

Step five of art journal tutorial making circles from ” kissed painted” paper

6.Now for the next texture step: stencils and texture paste.  I used Ann Butler’s new Clearsnap Stars art screen and added a small drop of Clearsnap Crafters Ink Sunshine re-inker to a bit of white texture paste. I moved the screen around the page and added 3 clusters of stars around my “planets”.

Step six of art journal tutorial adding texture stars with mask

7. From this step and on I just added different mediums, such as black gesso used with Ann Butler’s Lattice art screen on two corners to give this piece a bit of texture all around. Please make sure that your  black gesso is totally dry! Unless you do like black mess around your table and outfits…Add some glitter embossing powders around the ” planets” and heat emboss it to get this fun shine look.  Some black shading was made with a bit, just a bit, of Night Crafters ink around the circles using … a finger.  Yes, making Mixed Media means “use your hands, fingers and anything around“.   I added the title using bare chip boards and  inked them a bit with Ann Butler’s Sunshine ink.

Here is a finished project.

Finished art journal page by Irit Shalom

And a small close-up of the finished page:

Close- up of a piece of a finished art page made for tutorial

Hope you like my tutorial and will try these art journaling techniques.