Play Date

Gayl came over this morning and we had a blast making backgrounds for our art journals.  First we brushed on gel medium which makes a great foundation for the paints we added later.   After the papers dried, we painted different colors of acrylic paint on the pages, then we started wadding up plastic wrap and doing a kind of faux painting number on them, alternating between putting paint down and taking paint off with the same wrap.  We laid down stencils and painted the inside of them.  We added glitter paints and sprays.  We laid Punchinello on the page and painted the holes.  And sometimes if the paper was too dark, we dabbed white paint all over with the aforementioned plastic wrap to tone it down.  On the page above, I painted inside a dragonfly stencil, then spread glitter over it while it was still wet.  Gayl ended up painting a beautiful leaf design on one of her pages and embellished it with tiny doodles in black ink.

It was fun because it wasn't a project and there didn't need to be a result.  We had fun experimenting and amazingly, we didn't throw out a single piece of work.  If we didn't like something, we just painted over it until we liked it.  Now we have some beautiful backgrounds to add more art to for our art journals and we committed to doing this a lot more often.