December Calendar Journal Page

Hi folks!!!

Well so much for last months plan to catch up on writing the posts for the projects I have made at classes over the last few months!!

As always life gets busy at this time of year for all of us and some things just don't get done!

This months calendar page is evidence of that.  

My intentions of getting it done early, so that I wouldn't be rushing last minute, went out the window.

I haven't had much time recently to do any creating at home and I think if I don't do some regularly I get out of the habit and when I go back to it, its much harder as the Mojo has sunk out of sight!!

So I started this months page on the last day of November thinking I would get it done that day.  Didn't happen, as life got in the way, and it took until today to get back to it.  So I have been thinking about it and planning it too much in the mean time!!  Another sure fired way for me to block my mojo!

I find I work best if I just sit down and see what happens, If I don't like what happens I keep at it until I get it to work.  Definitely the case this month!! Lol 

I decided I wanted to make it Christmasy, so sprayed the back of last months page with black, blue and white Dylusions ink sprays!!  The page already had marks and some paint on it from when I did Novembers page (on the other side) but that doesn't bother me and I think it adds to the effect.

I thought I would try adding some more depth to the background using black pan pastel and a torn sheet of paper to create the illusion of hills.

I loved the background as always and that's where I stopped on the first day.  I tried to get back to it a few times but had no clue where to go next.

Finally I saw a picture of some snowballs and that sparked off the idea.

I wanted to draw the pile of snowballs directly on the background rather than cut them out and stick them on but I realised that with the sprays being reactive to water, know matter what I used to paint or draw the snowballs with would either end up mixing this the background colour or not being strong enough to cover the blue.  So like it or not they had to get drawn on to paper and stuck on.

I used Matt medium to stick the paper down and went over it with thin coat as well.  Again a problem occurred to me, some of the things I tried to colour the snowballs in with made it impossible to write on and as these will be my day spaces and I will fill them in this was an issue.

Finally I painted over all of the snow with Golden paint in white, and that seemed to sort it.

I then went round the snowballs with a stabilo write all black pencil and used a water brush to blend it to create more shadow and depth.  I then used some more black pan pastel to smudge over the edges to try and help with the illusion of shape.

I stamped a tree down the edge using a small branch stamp and archival ink.

I cut the sign out of grunge paper and coloured it with the brown Dylusions ink spray and used a brown pen to draw in some graining.  I printed the lettering on the computer and used the antique linen distress ink pad to mute the colour and vintage photo to blend over the edge of the sign and the whole page.

Lastly I added some small dots of stickles and used an ice pen to create the icicles (they weren't totally dry when I took the picture so it does end up clear).

This morning I was ready to give up on it as I was really struggling but as I have done each pages for the last 23 months it seemed a shame to give up now.  Not my favourite page but certainly different and I used a few things that I haven't before.

I hope you all have a great month!!

Take care

xxxHUGZxxx