A beautiful page by Jessica for Hero Arts

This was the 4th page for my art journal from Hero Art's Mixed Media Stamp a Long. This class was taught by Jessica Frost-Ballas. Jessica's "official" photograph you see online is quite serious; doing a live class with her she is a lot of fun, she loves splatter but she is also very precise. Thankfully she went over the size of the page we were supposed to be doing and OMG I had it slightly wrong, so if you're doing the online class and reading this the correct dimensions for the "homemade" accordion journal are: covers; 5" x 7" with the inside pages; 4-7/8" x 6-7/8"

This means our mats if we use one should be no bigger than 4-3/4" x 6-3/4" so we can close our accordions nicely. Therefore our base card should be 4-3/4" x 6-3/4" if no mat or 4-1/2" x 6-1/2" if we have a tiny mat.

I "heard" the page size and thought that was the size for the paper we are working on. I have cut slivers of 2 of my 3 completed pages and my first page is now the cover and it has the words Create on it, so that should be perfect in all honesty. I only matted it as it was quite warped with the techniques I had done on it.

But back to the "beautiful" card with Jessica:

I have to be honest I wasn't really that sure I liked this page looking at the images and the prep before watching the class video.  I'm still a little bit undecided but I learnt quite a few different ideas and there is really a lot I like about this page. I wish I had more coloured sprays and kicking myself after completing the page I actually do have the purple and gold spray which I thought I bought but couldn't find. Jess used on her page four two-tone sprays Spring Green, Ocean Blue, Fuchsia and Royal Purple; all with gold as the 2nd tone. I did not like the Ocean Blue flowers at all on her card to me they jarred and didn't go with the other colours. So I used Spring Green and Fuchsia happily enough, then thought I would use my only other 2 sprays I own; apart from black, white and shimmer ones, which are Lavinia Golden Temple (in the picture above it's the flower between the 2 fuchsia flowers and is golden with almost a copper mica) and Izink Gold Mine dye spray (Aladine) - it's the very motley gold flower above the sentiment and then I hated it so much on the bigger flower I sprayed on some Ocean Blue, which I think made it worse. I'm not liking the Izink spray at all when applied directly to card stock. I used both these sprays at SENZ making my fab AALL and Create card and the sprays were great used through a stencil on an ink blended background (you can check out the yellow card HERE).

What I liked about this project was actually working on Charcoal card stock, we used Charcoal and black ink to darken 2 opposite corners. We then stamped the Positive Script Bold Print with firstly the black ink, then we made a puddle of a few drops of  White Glimmer Metallic ink and a drop of two of water and used this for stamping with the same stamp set (we stamped off once onto scrap paper before stamping on our card panel). Left over metallic white was splattered randomly around. Jessica's tips for splattering were (a) the harder the tap, the bigger the splat; (b) a bigger brush makes a bigger splat and  (c) your paintbrush needs to be moist with water already otherwise what you're trying to splat just gets absorbed into the brush. 

We then used our finger tips to rub some Glitter Paste around the edges, I probably didn't add enough but there's some between the 2 gold patches on the RHS and it looks fab IRL. We also finger dabbed what was quite a lot of Gold Hero wax for me around the edges plus also made a wee pool of it too by adding some to a few drops of water on our craft mat. I actually thought this was looking pretty damn amazing at this stage after my initial reluctance to do this project.

Then it's really just a matter of arranging your flowers from the Beautiful Day bundle we had coloured up with our sprays. Jessica's placement was different the 2nd time around so it's about placement with the background you have achieved. She also discussed about making triangles with our flower colours plus having odd numbers when planning where are flowers were placed. I also added some Gold Hero Pearls to my flower centres.

I think I would be happier with my efforts if the flowers with the Goldmine Izink spray wasn't on my project page, but overall I was really pleasantly surprised how fun this was and it has a lot of wow. Only 2 more projects to share I am very thankful Hero Arts has started up the Facebook group page and the weekly inspiration. I am hanging out till my discount code I get from SCT big box event I can use in the Hero Arts shop as my wish list is growing and no one down under seems to sell much Hero Arts  which is a shame as the kiwi dollar is not very strong at the moment and US shipping kills me and my craft budget when we sink too low:(

They also have planned a Stamp a Long for their Holiday catalogue which I am really tempted to do as I have loved, loved this event but I have my SCT big box event coming up real soon plus my Pinkfresh Studio and The Stamp Market combined Holiday event so my plate is full, as is my craft room shelves. So guess I'll just work on getting some more mixed media products for the moment when I can use my discount code. Hopefully it covers the shipping.

Thanks for popping in and I hope you do Have A Beautiful Day!

✿ Karen ✿