Art Journaling with Bubble Wrap

It's Sunday already and time for another spread in the Positively Creative Art Journal. I'm guessing there's hardly a reader of my blog that hasn't heard about stamping with bubble wrap, and probably many of you have actually tried it. It's been on my radar for years, and yes indeed, when I rummaged through my stamping/painting supplies, I found some small pieces of bubble wrapped tucked away. These are very small bubbles, and probably because of their age, a bit deflated. Still, they worked just fine. First step, stamp a few times across the unpainted page with one of the colors.

Second step, paint over the page with another color. Remember the nice swirls I said I got on a previous page but lost because I added more paint to more thoroughly block out the text on the paper? I used that same brush and color of paint here, and since the bubbles were not to be totally obliterated, I didn't have to worry about full coverage. The directions did say to wipe some of the paint off, but that wasn't necessary. The yellow did knock back the green a bit more than this picture would lead you to believe.

Third step, stamp with the bubble wrap again with a third color. I'd rinsed the first color out of the foam brush and thought I'd squeezed all the water out, but there was enough in there to leave the violet paint a little thin. A different effect that I did not dislike.

While the page dried, I reviewed the journaling prompt. I'd read through the lesson after finishing up last week's spread and had been thinking about Dale Ann's challenge to avoid using "don't", "no" and "not". Catch yourself phrasing something in the negative using one of those words, try rephrasing it in the positive. I know what she's getting at here, but I truly found it difficult to catch myself saying or thinking things that needed to be rephrased. Instead, I started thinking about how it feels when someone says, "Don't" or "No", and what might be a good response. I think that thought comes from my iRest Yoga Nidra practice of the last few months as well as my resolution word focus of "explore". How can you explore if you put up barriers of don't do that and this is not working? I roughed out a possible design so I wouldn't forget. 

As I prepared to add text to the page, I was happy that cut and paste was optional - not really in the mood to page through magazines for letters and words today. But I haven't been terribly happy with my printing on previous spreads. Wait! I have an alphabet stamp set! Time to get it out and use it.

I've really liked using the Gelly Roll pen but I only have it in white. My other pens have not always worked well on the acrylic paint and I've been frustrated by the limited number of colors on hand. So when I went to Staples to take advantage of their 20% off everything in your bag sale, I was hoping that they would have some gel pens in stock. I took a chance on this set by Sarasa, partly because of price and partly because of the variety of colors. They flow quite nicely and the retractable feature is quite convenient. The .07 point gives a thinner line than I'd hoped but so far that is the only drawback. According to the label, they are archival and acid-free, and I found they flowed across the painted surface without a glitch.

So I used a couple of different colors to help isolate the negative stamped words from the challenge response to them, and added some additional text borne of my yoga studies. The wavy lines filled in with cross-hatching didn't work quite as well as I thought they would, but I'm reminding myself that this is part of why I'm doing these exercises - to try things and see what works and what doesn't. Why not?!?

Oh, and one last thing. I decided to use a babywipe to clean off my stamps, and it was quite messy. Oh, let's stamp the excess ink off first onto this scrap piece of paper that has been saved to use in a future lesson. Ooh, I like that! And then I stamped on the babywipe and saw a good image come off. I swore I would not save these babywipes to incorporate into my art as some do, but here I am, my waste-not-want-not mantra leading me astray...