Use what you have!

 

 

 



This is a page in my greeting card journal that I just couldn't figure out what to do with. I had botched up the background by applying two colors of acrylic paint that I had left in my pallet from another project. Not wanting it to go to waste I had applied it all to the left greeting card page to cover the original Christmas design. It wasn't pretty.

Since there was an excess amount of paint I let it dry a little to get tacky and then brought the two pages together hoping to create a symmetrical design and some texture in the otherwise drab brown and blue colors I had swirled on the one page. But I hadn't let it dry enough and it just made a mess!

So, not happy with the results, I blotted it up by laying a paper towel over it and pressing lightly to soak up some of the pools of paint. But the pages still just looked like an ugly mess.




The paper towel print turned out great - resembling an owl, as seen above, and I used that as art to cover other larger greeting card page designs somewhere else in the journal.

I really needed to brighten up those other backgrounds though. I doodled a little, drawing some pen lines here and there. I used a permanant marker to make some concentric circles, and then out-lined a few shapes and edges - all without much improvement at all.

 

So I brought out my colors that pop! Nail polish! I always have tons of colors of nail polish and of course some get thick and gunky before I get them used up. But I've never let them go to waste. I save them in with my art supplies. I can always add a bit of nail polish remover to the bottle to thin them back up and they make a fast easy way to apply lots of color. Various colors and lots of dots and small bristle shapes applied with the tiny polish brush results in a confetti look.  Better.

 

 

 

Now I needed something light to contrast that still quite dark background so I decided to use some of the garbage stampings I had done on off-white example sheets for a prior post. Instead of throwing them away I cut out the flowery shapes, and circles to use for the center of the blooms. I used three other textures from the sheets to cut leaf shapes out of, and one of the long curved prints served as the stem. For the opposite page I snipped out more print shapes forming the "i" and a "<3 creating="" flowers="" heart="" love="" message="" p="" the="">

 

It may not be the most beautiful page in my journal, but it has a certain quilt-like charm. And I just used what I had around to doctor up my mistake!