Art Journal Page - Start to Finish

I had some free time yesterday to just play in my art journal and was inspired by this page I saw on Pinterest by Julie Kirk. In this post she documents creating her page from start to finish and I thought I would try creating a similar page which is not the usual style I do in my journals.

I also thought it was a good idea to do photos of the process, so here you are - my journal page from start to finish.

This photo is of the first two steps as I got carried away with glueing down and forgot to take a photo of the first step. First I glued down the book text page, a torn piece of security envelope (upper right) and a scrap patterned paper (red floral).  (The green area you see above the face is spray ink on the page from cleaning off a stencil previously. This will get covered in the end.) The next step was glueing down a few images cut from magazines.  I used Decou-Page from DecoArt for all glueing - it's similar to Mod Podge but smoother, less sticky and I like the finish better. I also used an old credit card to spread the glue - less messy than a paintbrush and no cleanup at the end!

Then add words and phrases cut from magazines and books, overlapping some of the images.

Add more bits and pieces (images or papers or both), again overlapping some previous elements.  Overlapping and "connecting" elements gives cohesiveness to the design and unifies the collage rather than just having isolated elements glued to a page.

Here I added a bit of white paint over some of the book text  and also around some edges of images to make them blend into the background more.

Here I also forgot to take a few step photos. After painting above, I removed the sprayer from a red spray ink and flicked droplets over the page. When this was dry I added a few more elements (the floral border on left edge and black text in upper right - both REALLY old stickers!), doodled around the glued-on words and journaled between elements.

I like how this turned out and I enjoyed using different techniques from what I usually do.