Spring Butterflies

Hi Everyone!  Danie here with you today.........one of my favorite collage sheets from Altered Pages which I use often is called Beautiful Butterflies.  I just love butterflies they are such an inspiration in life and share so many beautiful messages.  One such message is that of transformation which is a message often shared by the Season of Spring so today I thought I'd combine the two together and play about in my large Dylusions Journal.

                          Butterflies in flight - a scan to give you a close up of my journal page

I got messy creating the background across two pages which started with me having all my butterflies cut out from the collage sheet and have a quantity of circles in two different sizes punched out from some cheaper white paper.  As I progressed however I decided to create on only one page leaving the background on the other for another day.

I started by cutting and punching out!

Ensuring I was working on pages I had already Gessoed in my journal I simply took a selection of paint in Spring Colors squeezed some out directly onto the pages and smeared them around with a foam brush to cover the majority of the white.

Added paint direct to the page and smeared around.

I then took the circles and randomly placed them across the painted background I had created.

Punched circles become masks.

Taking Spray Inks in colors similar to my paint colors I then sprayed the pages with the circles in place and allowed some time for this to dry a bit before using a paper towel to mop up any excess spray and then removed the circles.

A layer of spray ink used with the circle masks.

The spray ink added further depth of color and colored in some of the white space initially left at the completion of my paint layer.  As you can see in the above photo the circles ensured that the background behind them while they were in place was unaffected by the spray ink and this has left a interesting shadow like effect on the background made up with circles.

Stenciling with the left over piece from my punched circles.

At this stage I added some further paint in the same colors I started with and took some punchinella and using some of the blue and a bit of white stencilled with it in some areas.  I then took the strip of paper I had punched some of the circles out of and used this as a stencil across the bottom of my page with black paint.

Stamping, more paint and masked circles.

I then took some black paint and a texture stamp and stamped into and across my background, before taking two new paint colors and the circles once more to mask and create more circles and another layer of paint across the page.  Using my finger and the punchinella I also added a little white paint to lighten up some areas.  In total I used six paint colors plus black and white on the background.

A touch of white for a little bit of light

While the paint on my journal pages dried, I stamped out 3 stems of leaves using a Dylusions Stamp. I then roughly colored the leaves in using my Big Brush Markers.  The leaves I am using to create a bush for the butterflies to be emerging from, so I simply cut leaves off the stems and layered them randomly onto the page.  Once stuck down I took a little bit of green paint and smeared this around the leaves to get rid of any white edges and blend a little more into the background.  I then took a Black Pen and messily outlined the leaves and added some dots and dashes across the bottom of the page to ground the leaves a little.

Stamped leaves layered to create a bush.

A stamped and embossed verse was added to finish it off.

Now it was just a matter of adding my butterflies and a quote.  I used a stamp to add the quote and embossed with black embossing powder.

It reads 'Just when the butterfly thought the world was over it became a beautiful butterfly'.

Don't forget there is still a few more days left in the month to pop back and check out all the wonderful projects by my fellow Altered Pages Design Team members featuring the Sabor Papers.

Danie xx