Journal Planning

Hello everyone, I hope that you are all keeping well, and enjoying the recent warm weather. I have a couple of projects to share with you today that were first shown on last month's TV shows on Hochanda. These very versatile stamp sets were drawn by Kim Moody for Chocolate Baroque, and have been such a pleasure to work with.

I fell in love with these images as soon as I saw them, and knew straight away what I wanted to do for my first two designs. I created a plan in my journal, sketching a layout and trying out a colour scheme for these two cards. I used Katya, masking off her headdress, and stamped just the face, the dangly decorative pieces of the headdress, and the shoulders. I drew a headband and some hair, and also extended the dangles up to the headband. I added a pattern onto the headband, and also added a similar design onto the bodice. Once complete, I used some Masking Tissue, and traced the design, before cutting it out, and covering the image.

I stamped the dreamcatcher from Catching Dreams and coloured the background with a light wash. I added some feathers and the sentiment from Hold On. I coloured the images with koh-I-Noor pencils, sticking to a fairly limited colour palette of ochre, red and green and brown.

For my second project, I wanted to create a Native American landscape, incorporating the teepees, and the cacti. I stamped the main image from Do Right Always, and added the cacti to one side. I added extra lines to complete the scenery using a fineliner pen. I added more rocks and grass at the front, and mountains at the back. I coloured the picture using watercolour pencils, blending several colours together, to create a more natural feel. I used lots of terracotta to create a very scorched dessert look to the earth.

I wanted to show you my unfinished journal sketches, so that you could see how true the final cards were to my original plans. They were pretty close!

I will be back later in the month with more projects to share with you. Stay safe, and take care, xx