The Second Floor Challenge & A Year In The Life of an Art Journal...

Julie and Nat have issued their first "Second Floor" challenge, and I'm excited to play along! The challenges are meant to have you stretch your artistic legs a little and try things that may be out of your comfort zone. The focus is on the process, making mistakes and learning along the way.

This first challenge is to use gold paint. This was a good one for me because I'm not one to go for metallic anything (usually). Well, I had this art journal page already started; so I thought I'd try using some gold paint on it.

My first idea was to smear a soft layer of gold over the blue/green background, and then wipe most of it off. That looked pretty good, but I wanted to take it a step further. I decided to try the technique where you blob some watery paint on the page and then blow through a straw to create an interesting effect. Umm, yeah...

First of all I didn't have a straw, so I tried blowing through a pen cover. Didn't work so well, and quite frankly I felt like the paint ended up looking like some sort of bodily fluid spill. Yuck. What to do...?

The next thing I tried was wadding up some waxed paper and blotting it around a little...
When I did that, the shimmer of the gold started to show up and it emphasized the texture of the paint - I really liked it! Yeayyy!

There was still some paint left in the cup, so I poured it onto a different page, and stamped it around with the top and bottom edges of the paper cup...

Again, ewwww yucky! So...

not to be dismayed, I decided to spray a favorite bright colored ink (Mr. Huey Plum Thumb), and some water, and I ended up with this...

It shimmers and glows and I LOVE it! It is the start of another journal page to be finished somewhere down the road!

Can't say I am now a gold paint fanatic, but I'm really glad I tried it, and I like what I ended up with. Thanks for the inspiration Julie and Nat! Can't wait to find out what the next challenge is! To find out more about the Second Floor Challenges, click here.

I ended up using the first journal page I showed you to complete the following "Year In The Life of an Art Journal" prompt:

THE PROMPT: Childhood memories
(it can be something from your own childhood or from your kids, a memory, a thought...)
THE STUFF: Glimmer mists & paint (time to get messy!)
THE TECHNIQUE: silhouettes (can be black, patterned paper, anything goes as long as it's a silhouette)

I used two of the three prompts to create this final page...


The large abstract flower in the background was done by tracing Julie Fei-Fan Balzer's fragmented flower stencil with a black, then a white marker.

Find out more about the "Year In The Life of an Art Journal" prompts here.

Thanks for visiting! I will see you again soon!