Blog-Along and Second Chances

Hello good people and welcome to day 1 of Blogalong with Effy.  Here's my attempt at 30 posts in 30 days. We're just gonna call it an attempt till it actually happens, ok?  No pressure...no pressure...  To learn more or to join in the fun yourself, please click on the Blogalong link in the left sidebar.

After the relative success of the layers on the last post, I got really inspired to try to fix some of the pages that have been sitting in my journals in a state of limbo.  Ugly, unfinished...both...  Anyway, I've got one to share with you today:

This page started out as an attempt to use Artist acrylic paints.  I have been admiring other people's use of them, so I got myself the basic colors (red, yellow, blue, black and white) to see how I fared.  In my head, they were going to be exactly like craft acrylics...they are NOT.  I can mix colors of craft acrylics with relative ease...getting exactly the color I hoped for in a matter of minutes.  Artist acrylics are not that way for me.  So I had stuck down some of the red and yellow on the page and mixed them a little to a really red leaning orange.  And this page sat untouched for several months because it was so eye-gougingly BRIGHT, practically painful to look at, and I had no idea what to do with it.

So I thought to myself, what bothers me about this page so much...and it was the extreme brightness that bothered me the most.  So I grabbed some Vintage Photo Distress Stain and went over the whole page to tone it down.  Phew...eyeball relief!  So the brightness was gone, and that helped a lot, but what to do next...

I've been watching some of Donna Downey's Inspiration Wednesdays on YouTube (which are SO interesting to watch...I love her "let's just try it and see what happens" attitude).  And she uses ink drops in a lot of her pages.  So I thought I might add some ink drops and see what happens...  What happened was I realized that there is some kind of magic technique to getting splattery drops that I have not learned yet...I really need to watch more closely when she ink drops I guess...  I ended up with pretty uniform circles of ink...not splaterry goodness.  So I improvised and turned my journal in a couple different directions so that the drops would run.  And WHAM!  It suddenly turned into something I liked and I knew where I wanted to go...

I have had that Tim Holtz "Fanciful Flights" die cutter forever, and I never use it, but it popped into my brain, so I grabbed it, cut out the shapes and went over them with some Glossy Accents.  While that dried, I got some Kraft Glassine (which is AWESOME) and crinkled and colored it using Distress Stains.  ...I just realized that this page could be an advertisement for Ranger products...where's my money Ranger???...  (haha...but seriously, pay me...)  I assembled my little butterfly dealie...and before anybody mentions it, I put the wings on backwards on purpose.  Seriously.  Seriously!!!  I think they look cooler that way!  Or at least different...make it your own, right?...  Then I outlined the butterfly in a red poster paint sharpie (I have found that the poster paint sharpies work a lot better for me than the other 'paint' sharpies, by the way!  I really want to get a white one and see if it works as well as the other colors...I have had bad luck with the other white 'paint' sharpies...maybe the poster paint one will tickle my fancy...)  Then I began the multi layered journaling of "If it weren't for second chances..." (a fitting line for this page that I picked out of the song below) I put gold sharpie, the red poster paint one, black sharpie and at last used a Pen-touch white pen which is where it finally stood out enough to be readable...so really, if it weren't for third, forth, or fifth chances, this writing would not have happened...