A New Chapter ~ Art Journaling

I signed up for an art journaling club at Scrapbook Centrale. Today was the first get-together. I had no idea what to expect, I just wanted to learn new techniques and have fun. Mission accomplished! We were working with Dylusions sprays by Dyan Reaveley. I LOVE color, so brightness is not something that I am intimidated by. In fact, I usually have an aversion to soft and muted colors. Hmm...what does that say about me? Anyhow, this is the journal that we all had to purchase for the class:

I can tell you I was really excited to get to this class and just play. I am also looking forward to filling this journal over time. Having the club meet once a month will be a lot of fun and playing in between should be great too. Normally, I am a very linear and uncluttered kind of crafter (when scrapbooking), but with this I feel free to just get messy. It's fun to watch your creation take form as you play with it. Here is what I worked on today (the initial sprays of color):

I wanted saturated color, so just putting it everywhere was how I started. I am gonna have to buy these sprays (I feel a new addiction coming on). As you can see, the pages underneath WERE white. The finished product is not indicative of that at all:

I used water to get some dripping. I wanted to see how that looked (I will be using that technique a LOT, I think). Then I used some alpha stamps to stamp "PLAY" because that is what I was doing. I wanted my first pages to reflect what I was doing. I stamped a journaling area in the bottom left corner to explain that it was the first class and that I was having fun. Then I decided I needed a bit of dimension, so I used some stamps the store had and did the butterflies using gesso. You can also see that I used some stencils/masks for the hearts and the bubbles on the top right (all with gesso). While the gesso was still wet, I sprayed the Dylusions on them so that the color would go with the page (I wasn't interested in having them be white and have such a stark contrast). I then added on some sayings and words that were stamped on paper, sprayed them and adhered them to the pages. I went around some of the elements with a white pen to define the edges and used a black one to doodle around the edges of both pages. Voilà! My first pages in my art journal, just playing with color. I have some Stampotique stamps that I think will definitely get some use in this journal. My creative juices are flowing!!!