Beautiful Backgrounds

A good few weeks ago now, I attended a journaling backgrounds workshop, with my Mum, at the fabulous Art from the Heart in Harrogate.  The workshop was taught by Kate Crane, who has been featured in Art Journaling Magazine, and was fantastic!  She taught us 2 techniques for creating backgrounds for journaling.

The first technique involved lots of layering up acrylics using a card to apply them.  We then added spray inks, stamps and shapes to build it all up to create a gorgeous background.  Finally, we journaled on top.  I added some cut out stamps of houses on text taken from old books, putting them on top of some ripped sheet music to ground them. 

The second technique Kate showed us involved finger painting!  Very messy but lots of fun and it created an amazing background!  Again, we layered it up with spray inks, stencils and stamps and then journaled on top.  I picked the lady above, stuck on with tape, and a giant bug which made me think of Doctor Who! 

During the workshop, I had the opportunity to use pastels, which I've never worked with in my journals before, to highlight areas.  Very effective.

Of course, when I got home I had to have a go at these techniques, to make sure I hadn't forgotten how to do them, and I experimented with using fewer colours, different stamps and adding other layers. 

We really enjoyed the workshop, took some great ideas away with us and had the chance to do a bit of shopping (I took cash and no cards!) And of course, we had a lovely dinner in the cafe downstairs, bagel with cream cheese and a giant piece of coffee and walnut cake, mmm! 

(If you go to Kate's blog, there are some photo's from the workshop and you can just see the top of my head, I look very busy!)