Adding to my journal

Good morning friends
Over the weekend I had a moment to "play" in my studio so I took time to use some of my new dies and Distress colours. I started out with two tags and ended up with this page in my journal. Talk about a change in direction!

The focal point is this butterfly.

This is how I put it all together.

 I began by cutting two tags with the Tim Holtz Mixed Media Thinlits dies which I picked up from The Artistic Stamper. I have to say I love these. One thing I will say though is that when I bought them I was unaware that you needed a magnetic shim for them so I had to play around with card to make a temporary shim that worked. Got there in the end though. I then placed the two tags together and stamped the butterfly (Tim Holtz Perpective) over both in Archival ink and used Mermaid Lagoon Distress ink to colour the tags

 For the next stage I took the Flourish stencil and Cracked Pistachio ink to add detail to the tags.

 I repeated this with Abandoned Coral Distress ink to add a second layer.

 Then it was time to colour the image and for this I used the same three colours. This time the markers. I added colour and blended them with a water filled brush. What I love about the markers is how they blend. It is definitely my colouring medium of choice.

 My original idea had been to make two tags but by the time I reached this stage I decided that I really liked the whole butterfly.

So I glued them together onto a piece of white card and trimmed to the shape you can see. Because the right side tag was smaller than the left I had an awkward area of white. Which was perfect for another of the Tim Holtz Thinlits dies, this one was a word one. (Cannot remember what it is called, words like lifetime, adventure, discover, seven in total I think.) The one I used, moments, fit perfectly.

Then it was time to find it a home, which as you saw earlier, was in one of my journals.

This journal is made using all different sized hand made papers. I added the element to the left and followed the theme to the right hand page by adding detail to the already inked page by using the Flourish stencil, adding a couple of different butterflies and stamping one of the sentiments from the same plate as the butterfly image.
It was fun to do and I enjoyed using the three new Distress colours as they worked well together.