I Meant To Say...And I Fixed It"

I'm so super excited about my page for this week's Journal 52 prompt!  (You can read more about J52 HERE.)  The prompt was 'Love Letters', and I think I diverged from my routine a little bit on this one, and I REALLY like the result so much:

"You are all the words I meant to say but couldn't scribble them down before they slipped away."

In the beginning I struggled a little with what I wanted to put on the page...and then it hit me.  One of my goals for this year is to work on my hand lettering...and I thought that this was the perfect opportunity to practice...I mean, love letters...c'mon!

Because I am not the best with lettering, I used a piece of manila card stock to write out my quote (which is from a poem I wrote that can be found HERE if you want to read the whole thing).  It came out just right the first time!  ...I couldn't believe it either...  I wanted to make the paper look aged and like it had been read over and over...I got a little out of control with the Vintage Photo Distress Stain though, so the whole page is now brown...but that's ok, you can still read it!  I crumpled it up (after deliberating for a long time, because the writing was pretty good...for my skill level...but if you can make it once you can make it again, right?) and then used stamp pads to hit the high spots and make them stand out more.

Then on the watercolor paper (I've been using this as a base for all my J52 pages so far...and a lot of my other pages too...), I decided to pull out my Dylusions and used Vibrant Turquoise and White Linen colors mixed together.  An interesting thing happened...a happy accident, really.  I had sprayed the Turquoise first in a few spots and was going to spray the white into it right away, but had to go take the dog out (he insisted) and when I came back to the page, the turquoise had dried a lot.  But I figured they were water-soluble so they should still work, right?  And I sprayed the white over top.  What happened was these really cool areas where the turquoise sunk into the page and turned this grungy weird color...  I was a little disappointed at first, so I tried to cover it with more turquoise and white mixed and then dripped water in a few places...and it ended up being really cool and vintage looking.  I could never have figured that out if I was trying to do it on purpose!

When that dried, I stamped  all over the page using brown Stayzon ink and a stamp from Hero Arts called "La Letter"...and it was looking good!  Then I thought, what if I try to make it look older with some stamp pads (I mean, the ink box was already open...I HAD to!), and this time it happened like I wanted...(note to self: use stamp pads, not distress stain, for aging purposes).  

Then I wondered if I could make coffee cup stains on the page.  First I used Neocolor II's and they didn't give the effect I wanted...I almost thought I had ruined the page...so then I tried using brown India ink, drawing circles with a pipette to do it.  That was more of the look I was going for.  It didn't end up exactly how I wanted it to, but it has me going in the right direction, and with a little more practice, I think I can eventually get a really cool coffee cup stain.  But, even though it doesn't look like a coffee cup stain to me, it does look pretty cool!  When everything was dry, I took foam tape and stacked some pieces on top of each other in different thicknesses to attach the writing page to the background page.  I wanted it to look like somebody had just laid the note down and was coming back for it any minute...and it totally looks like that to me!!!  (Can you tell I'm excited by this page?)

Also, related to J52, I used a suggestion by my friend Pamikins to make some changes to one of last week's pages for the 'Abstract' prompt (it's SO much better now!):

"completely without meaning"
Thanks to Pamikins for the suggestion of adding words to the 'middle school art project page'...I also added thicker black lines, and I like this page WAY better now than I did before...It's still out of my comfort zone, but with the darker lines and the words, I no longer hate it!  I kind of like it more and more every time I look at it.  Thanks, Pamikins! <3

And then, related to suggestions for page fixing, I used a suggestion by my friend Patricia to change this page from last week's Documented Life spread...it was a little thing, but it makes a big difference to me:

Thanks to Patricia for the suggestion of adding something to the middle of the flower...I couldn't think of anything else, so I just did splatters with white and green india inks.  That small change made a BIG difference to me...It looks finished to me now, and I think that's what I was looking for.  Thanks, Patricia! <3

And then, I got some fabulous mail art from my friend, Cheryl, (Thank you, my Cheryl!!!) that I kept forgetting to photograph!  I finally remembered and here she is:

"What is true beauty?"
I got a surprise card from my sweet friend Cheryl with one of her gorgeous faces on it!  I love her so much (both Cheryl and the face she sent)!!!  I like how she just colors in parts and leaves white space...it makes me so happy.  And I love this gal's lips!

I am so happy with my J52 page for this week.  Out of my usual, ended up accidentally learning a few cool things, and got to practice my letter skills!  I always talk about how much my handwriting looks like a 12 year old boy's...and I notice a lot of other people aren't fans of theirs either!  What about you?  Do you like your handwriting?  Do you think you can have bad handwriting skills, but be good at hand lettering?  (I hope you can...or else my dreams will be shattered! haha)