I love to create with a vintage colour palette, and this page was no exception, but I wanted a colourful but subtle element too. You'll see how I used the Mattints to achieve this easily.
Adding a watered down layer of Fresco Finish Chalk Acrylic, Chalk (FF83) knocked back the text a little. As it turned out later I should have made the layer thinner for the text to still show through.
I hope you can see where I'm going with this combination of stamped grid and Grunge Paste arches. I removed the centre of each square in the grid, thus creating windows.
The next step was to add some bricks to our scene. I stamped some squares from the Hot Picks stamp set, using Vintage Photo Archival Ink. Adding texture and dimension to some of the bricks was easy, a straight ended palette knife and grunge Paste did the trick.
I wanted the bricks and arches to have a grungy weathered look, so adding a small amount of black with a Stabilo All pencil and then activating with water, gave me the start of the look I wanted. The eagle eyed amongst you will have spotted that the arches had already had the grunge treatment. Sometimes I get carried away whilst creating and forget to take photos as I go along!
The next step to the grunge was to add some diluted Just Walnut Infusions, letting it settle into the texture.
I wanted a blend of subtle colours for the image and background, so I used a brayer to apply random areas of Mattints onto 240gsm Smoothy card (SCA4). I chose Squeezed (MT06), Dragonfly (MT07), The Pink (MT08) and Ladybug (MT12, available from a PaperArtsy stockist) for the Mattints.
After measuring the card to fit behind my newly created windows, I stamped more images onto the spare background card. These will be added to the scene within the window.
As you can see in this picture, I extended our figures shoulders to the bottom of the panel. It was at this point that I decided I wanted to tone down the background around the figure. I used a brush and a wash of Just walnut around her, but left her looking brighter.
As you see here, I stamped some stars from the Hot Picks stamp set and added those along with the additional details to our window scene. A little bit of additional shading around the masonry with a soft pencil and our page was complete.
I am very happy how my journal page turned out, I especially love the textured masonry and will be playing with that technique again I'm sure. I do wonder about the story behind our mystery Chatelaine in the window, is she happy, or sad, I'll let you decide.