Flowers for Robyn!

 by Lisa for Robyn

I've got into the habit of not checking which journal is coming to me next - anyone else doing this too?  It makes it nice to get a surprise in the mail!  

So when I received Robyn's Flowers journal it was indeed a nice surprise.  Inspiration came quickly for this, as I'm currently making some sunflowers for a canvas that I'm doing.  I had extra petals left over so thought, yes!  That's what I'll do!

I even remembered to take some progress pics, woo hoo! 😄

So these petals are made from recycled teabags, that have been dried, emptied, and glued onto either white cartridge paper, or an old school dictionary.  I then watercolour the papers, and cut them out.

For my background, firstly I covered the journal pages with a layer of torn cartridge paper.  Mainly because Robyn's journal is made of signatures, and I wanted the two pages to stay together.

Then I added teabags to the background.  Same method as above, except the empty teabags were cut into circles, and glued directly onto the cartridge paper background.  Overlapping the circles gives a really interesting effect!  

The beauty of gluing teabags is that, because they're porous, you can just plop them down on your page and glue over the top instead of having to glue each piece from the underside.  Genius!  I use matte gel medium for my glue.

After gluing the background, I added a few layers of blue watercolour.  Some colours react better than others, and the colour that you end up with also depends on the type of teabags you've used! 

Next I added the sunflower that I had made.  The centre was cut from another piece of cartridge paper and teabags, then watercoloured, and tea leaves added for texture.

A leaf and stem were also added to the page, created the same way.

My spread was almost done, but I wanted to add some text.  I couldn't find my letter stamps - put them away somewhere during an iso tidy up 😩...  So instead I grabbed a scrap of cartridge paper, ruled it into rectangles, pencilled my letters in, and scribbled them in with a Pitt pen!

After I cut them out, I outlined and smudged them with a water activated pencil.  Easy peasy!

And this is the end result!  I think it's a happy little page, which we really need right now.  High fives to the other Victorians putting up with Stage 4 restrictions, and well done to those living in other states for keeping it at bay - please don't get complacent though! 💜💛

Hope you like this Robyn!  Happy Arting everyone. 

Cheers, Lisa xx