Pack your bags ~ an RSD art journal spread

Hi everyone! The first of the month means two challenge posts for me. This one is an art journal spread for our Rick St. Dennis Progressive Challenge over at the Sparkle and Glitter blog. This month is the Anything Goes portion and for those who play along, the image for next month's challenge will be sent to them as a freebie. I haven't done an art journal spread in a while and had this idea in my back pocket just waiting for a chance to have a play. It's called Pack Your Bags...We're Going on a Guilt Trip. This saying makes me laugh and helps me put things into perspective at times.

When I asked Rick for a suggestion of an image that was suitable for the theme, he came up with one of Helen's Mice, August, available at his Zibbet shop, which I thought was just perfect. I love how touristy and enthusiastic she looks...and how that contrasts with feelings I have when anyone tries to use guilt to sway my decision. I coloured her with bright Prismacolor pencils and then added some white doodling to the black border before fussy cutting the frame and image.

The background began with torn index and map pages from a very old school atlas adhered with matte medium to the background. A thin coat of white gesso was painted over that and then blue and green Neocolor II crayons were scribbled over that. A wet paint brush spread the colour and once dry, Cotton Candy and Metallic Mint gelatos were applied to deepen the colours here and there as well as on the page edges. Forget-Me-Not Archival ink was sponged through the TCW netting stencil.

I went through my stash of travel ephemera and papers and chose a few pieces which I inked with Vintage Photo and edged with Black Big Brush pen. The words were snippets of a MME Travel themed page, and the vellum piece was from who knows where.All were adhered to the pages and outlined with a black pen before August was popped up on tape and joined them. Since Pack Your Bags was also part of the title, it was matted in orange cardstock, both to repeat the orange colour and to make it stand out from the other words.

The other half of the title was done with a Dymo labeller and Idea-ology Ransom AlphaParts to which I added white dots. Pieces of drywall mesh, white punched dots, and punched black border were added in a few places to create more layering and add contrast. Jet Black Archival ink was used on a text stamp and applied in a few places as well. To complete the pages, Black Big Brush pen and doodling were added to the edges which seems to frame the spread and keep the eye from drifting off of it.

Thanks for visiting August and me today. We appreciate your company and your kind comments. To view what some of my talented teamies created for the Progressive Challenge, please pop over to the Sparkle and Glitter blog. They are so talented! We would love to have you join us...you have the entire month to play along. You know you wanna!

Life is good; so is art.
Bonnie