Transform Your Art Journal: Create Mixed Media Transparencies with Grafix Arts! #mixedmedia #journal

Hi everyone, thank you so much for joining me today. So in today's tutorial I have a really fun mixed media art journal page to share with you using products from Graphics Arts. So I'm going to be working on a piece of the wet media dural art. This is a page from the mixed media journal but you can see that it also comes in a pad form as well and I'm going to be using a stencil here. Now I've put the dural art on a piece of copy paper just to make it a little bit easier for the camera to pick it up and I'm going to be applying some indigo blue super thick slap it on. This is like a clear texture paste so any kind of clear medium would work for this and it's just going to allow me to keep that butterfly area transparent on the dural art. So basically I'm using it as a bit of a mask really. So I'm just applying it with a palette knife, it's a nice creamy texture to work with. The challenge I had with my palette knife is because the stencil has quite a wide open area I ended up overworking the paste and then I started rubbing some of it off so I definitely think using a larger tool would have been easier with such an open stencil. Of course if you are using a stencil design that's not as open as this then you'd be absolutely fine using a palette knife. I do end up coming in with the Sizzix tool just to help me get a smooth finish and then you can see it's got that creamy consistency but I'm just going to pop it aside to dry. So once that's dry you can see that we've got that lovely butterfly design that's nice and transparent there on the dural art and I'm going to come in with some shimmer powders. Now these are just a few of the Nivea shimmer powders. I've got cherry balm, atlantis burst and falling leaves but I do end up swapping them out for some colorology powders that I had in my stash from the creative craft products line just because they're a little bit more vibrant. Now if you've anything like that they'll work for this technique as well but as you can see the powders react with water and they create this beautiful rainbow effect of color. I was impatient and I started moving the water around and ended up dabbing off some of the color powder where I didn't want it to dry and I just started making a mess really by fiddling with it. So the key to this technique is to add the powders spray it with water and leave it just let it dry because as you see I just start creating a hot mess and the more I mess with it the worse it gets. So these are the colorology powders now you can see they're a lot more vibrant but again because I picked it up I've moved all the powders so I ended up spraying a little bit of water and then I just left it and that really is the key here just be patient leave it to dry. It may take a few hours depending on how much water you've added but when it's dry you get this gorgeous rainbow watercolory background on the image and it just looks so cool. Now any powder that's on the butterfly we can just wipe off with a little bit of damp tissue or a cloth but I'm just going to work on the background page now. I'm going to use a piece of DuraBrite white so I've cut this down to six by six and I'm going to add some stamping using this Rubber Dance stamp set. This is the Mixed Media Marks stamp set. To do my stamping I'm going to use some black acrylic paint so I've just added some to my non-stick Tim Holtz matte. I've brayed it out and used that as kind of like my stamping base for this text stamp and so I really want to create a really gringy background here. I'm going to add a few different stamps in the background so I'm going to add this stitching stamp as well and again if you don't want a brayer on the paint to your stamp you can just stamp it directly into the paint. You just want to make sure that it is a thin coat of paint on your matte. I've added that grid stamp too and then I'm just going to use the mask from the stencil so I'm going to carefully line it up with the butterfly on the Wet Media DuraLine and then I'm going to place that on the white DuraBrite and so I'm just lining up so that I can then leave the mask behind and then I'm going to add some more of these ColourPop powders. So I'm just applying them to my non-stick matte. I'm going to give them a little spritz of water and then I'm going to use a sponge just a piece of craft sponge to dab some of the colour around the edge of that mask and this again is just going to really help keep that area of the butterfly nice and bright and white and really allow the butterfly design to stand out on the background and through the clear Wet Media DuraLine. So once I've added the colour you can see as they blend together there's a bit of purple. I'm then just going to add some acrylic paint splatters. This is a ColourPop from Pearly Winks but I'm just taking the spray bit out and using that to splatter some white paint and then I'm going to line up the stencil over the butterfly design and I'm just going to outline it with a white acrylic pen. This is from Ohuhu and that's just going to again ensure that we keep that lovely crisp edge of the butterfly stencil in the design and so as we put the two layers together you can really see how that butterfly stands out and all I'm going to do is take a pencil and just mark where each of those mushroom punch marks are for the disc binder and then I'm just going to create my own. So I'm just using a hole punch here just to pop holes in all of those areas and then I'm going to use my scissors and just trim out a little bit. I do have a mushroom punch but it doesn't line up with the disc binder and because it's an all-in-one punch then I'm not able to create just single holes so I'm able to just create them like that with a single hole punch and then my scissors. The sentiment says if nothing ever changed there'd be no such thing as butterflies. I've just printed that out on some white copy paper using my printer and then I'm just trimming it down using my mini Tim Holtz paper trimmer and I'm going to use the artist tack to adhere this down to the page. The artist tack is great for adhering things down especially to clear pages because it's just lots and lots of dots of adhesive so you can just peel back one of the removable sheets, place your item down, burnish it by folding the sheet back over it just to make sure that you've got good contact with the adhesive dots and then peel them off and you can just stick them down like stickers and they're permanent once they've been burnished down so really great product if you've not tried it I definitely recommend it. So just to finish off this page I'm just going to add a tiny bit more contrast with some white acrylic paint and a star stamp from Rubber Dance and then that's just going to finish off the page nicely. I just really felt that a bit of extra contrast would just benefit the design but I definitely could have left those out I think. But here's the finished pages for today so you can see we've got that gorgeous transparent layer of the wet media Duralart. I absolutely love this and using a clear paste as a resist has really created that fun design and then obviously we've got the page underneath with all of that text and grunginess again just to finish off that design. So I really hope that this has given you some inspiration today I hope that it's given you some encouragement to dig out your supplies and have a play. All the supplies that I've used will be listed in the description box below this video and thank you so much for joining me as always I really appreciate you watching don't forget to hit the thumbs up button if you've enjoyed this tutorial and if you're not subscribed to my channel already and would like to see more from me then please hit that subscribe button and I'll look forward to seeing you in the next video take care