Another simple background, made with standard craft acrylics. I painted the paler blue first then added the darker blue using a baby wipe, which allows you to smear and smudge to get the effect you want. A quick easy technique to borrow?
I sometimes make backgrounds ahead of time, especially on days when I can't really manage anything more complicated. When I decide on a background to use, the next thing that comes out is usually the shallow tray of collage pieces. I'm always collecting these - magazines and free leaflets etc are a good source - and I file them by colour. I know its terribly predictable, but I can't help it, so when I've made a blue background I get out the blues-purples tray. I just got made that way .... Anyway I LIKE tone on tone pages.
And you can see below what I did with the contents - I just cut out shapes to create some kind of frame around the page. Then I outline the shapes with grey marker to create shadows, and a black outline. The bird cut out from a magazine gave me the idea for what I wanted to say.
Then the next stage is to include something human to represent myself on the page, and very often the writing comes after that. These stages aren't a prescription for how to journal, but its a tried and tested way of working on days when I'm not full of genius inspiration (which is mostly)!
And then I just doodle around and have fun with whatever parts of the page are left. On this occasion I managed to leave quite a bit of space, not least because that's the subject of the page!
Mental space has been a little hard to find in recent days - so this is a reminder to myself that its something I really NEED and actually can't live without.
