2020 #2 A Hint of Spring: Garden Notebook with ESC {by Jennie Atkinson}

2020 Topic 2: A Hint of Spring

Often purples and greens are the first signs of spring bursting through from the cold winter months, but I guess that is totally dependent on where in the world you live and your particular climate. Jennie lives on a far northern UK Island, often cut off in winter from the rest of the world, and hard hit by rugged storms. So her kind of spring is a welcome sight I'm sure! ~ Leandra

Hi everyone, it's Jennie (Live the Dream) here with you today creating for this wonderful new topic. Hints of Spring puts me in mind of lovely fresh greens and pale coloured flowers. I decided to try and recreate this softness for a small gardening journal where I can keep notes of what was growing in the garden at this time of the year and perhaps do a  little watercolour painting.

Scrapcosy's fabulous flower stamps are always my go to for just about anything and I have used the main flower from ESC18 many times over. So how to do something different and recreate the softness of spring.

ESC18

You will see later in the post how it all came together using tissue paper, however, I had hoped to cover the whole piece with vintage beeswax to soften the colours even further ........ it was a disaster! so I had to start the whole process again and miss out the final step!

Stamping on tissue paper is a good technique to get to grips with and I have painted on the  reverse of the stamped image many times before. But in order to get a more transluscent feel to the painting I mixed my Fresco's with Satin Glaze. Do experiment with how much colour you need as it really doesn't take much to colour the glaze. I have kept my colour palette simple using just three colours of Fresco Finish paints: Magic Moss, Globe Thistle and Haystack

I have used a good quality tissue paper for this process. There are a lot of makes on the market, but I managed to pick this up at a craft fair and was delighted that it didn't have a shiny side and was slightly thicker than packing tissue. So it is worth looking around.

I wanted a base for my tissue so that the text would show through the translucent painting. I experimented with stamped text, but the random torn text paper worked best. I gave it a coat of gesso to tone it down a bit.

When gluing the tissue stamped elements to the background I find it easier to put the mutli-medium on the background first and lay the tissue on top, gently smoothing it out from the centre. If you add multi-medium to the tissue first it all manages to get stuck together and is a real job to get stuck down without too many creases!. You can see I have also stamped on tissue a couple of other elements from the stamp set. The beauty of tissue is that you can layer it over and over.

When fully dry you can see how well the torn tissue paper just dissolves into the background.

I wanted the sentiment (from Alison's wonderful Spring quotes) to stand out so have used some of the text paper for my stamping. Although the text paper was almost white, when stuck down and covered with multi-medium it turned this beautiful vintage colour! Everything got a heavy coat of multi-medium at this stage ready for the beeswax  and it took an age to dry. 

EAB06

I am not sure what went wrong with the adding the beeswax as all the layers started to lift off the background. It could be that I didn't leave it long enough to dry. Anyway not daunted I will continue to experiment, but as I needed to complete this project promptly I went back and recreated everything to this point!

I decided to use some darker green papers to highlight the softness of the images - do you remember the wonderful PaperArtsy printed paper packs. This is my very last piece! 

I like to soften the edges with some muslin and the easiest way of attaching this is to stitch everything together.

I used Eileen Hulls Pocket Notebook die to make the journal covers. Using these dies makes a pretty quick book and this one has a neat closure. I have kept embellishments to a minimum as the journal will be handled and is likely to be with me in the garden. I am so pleased to have found a lovely project to make with my last piece of PA paper!

I am very pleased with the translucent feel to the painting on the tissue. In particular, the  leaves seem to be made up of lots of different hues despite using only one colour. I shall certainly be using the Satin Glaze with my opaque Fresco's in future.

This was a reasonably quick and easy project to pull together although a lot of drying time between the steps was required. It has been good to experiment (even if a disaster!) and I am pleased with the final softness of the colours which give a hint of (hopefully) the Spring to come.

As always thank you for joining me and I hope you are inspired to give these techniques a go.

Jennie x

Blog: Live The Dream