Hello, Katrina here again to share with you one of my cut and paste journal pages using one of the February collage sheets.

This month’s theme FIGMENT could not be more perfect for me as I am known in my family and among my friends for having a rather vivid imagination!  A trait I am very proud of too!

The main reason I journal is to play with my imagination in my own little world, where anything is possible.  So when you give me 3 rather handsome seahorses all in a line, what else could I see but 3 very dapper seahorses all in a line!!  So the journal page was born!

To begin with I needed a background.  Now if you are anything like me and love to play with paints and inks, you will have, shall we say 1 or 2 or possibly even 3 different products to use.  The number of things I have is much higher than that but we will quickly skip over that!!!  So this year I am trying to actually use these products rather than just looking lovingly at them.  With this in mind I dug out some bottles of inks I had and used them to build up my background.

 To build up my background I -

• laid down some inks onto the page using some cut and dry sponge, I used Yellows and blues and blended them into each other.
• Using several different stencils I added more coloured ink, keeping to the same colour palette as I had used in the background.
• I kept adding colour and pattern until I was happy.

Now it was time to add my dapper seahorses!  I printed out the collage sheet and cut out the seahorses.

• Before I glued the seahorses down, I stamped a couple of times using a circle stamp, I didn’t re-ink my stamp the second time and so just got a ghost impression just above the middle seahorse.
• I then glued my seahorses onto the page and used my crayons to blend them into the background.

• I liked the way the stamped circles looked so I used a homemade stencil ( I had cut circles using my circle dies from some plastic packaging in different sizes ) to draw through with my crayons to add some more of the circles above the seahorses heads.

Now to dress the seahorses up!  I am lucky to be the proud owner of a Silhouette Cameo, an electronic cutting machine.  Every project I do on it amazes me and this one was no exception.  These shapes are so small the chain on the fob watches are almost as thin as a human hair! Amazing!

You could of course use die cuts or other images from digital kits you have at home.  Or you could simply draw them on, as I did their monocles.

So there you have it, the finished page.  I have dressed up my dapper seahorses and added the word magic from the same collage sheet.

I then used die cut letters for the lettering and highlighted them using a white pencil.

I hope you enjoyed my project today and will have some fun yourself with this month’s collage sheets and your imagination, you never know where you will end up!

The Collage Workshop is included in the Art Journal Emporium and then available for sale in the TB&CO Shop the following month. 

Previous Collage Sheet Workshops can be found here: Collage Sheets by Tangie.

For more information on the Art Journal Emporium visit Art Journal Emporium - Tangie Baxter & CO.

[posted by Katrina Rollings]