What a Beautiful Mess

As I've already mentioned that everything that happens in art journaling doesn't always turn out beautiful.  But experimenting is half the fun and to be honest even experiments that goes spectacularly wrong can be remedied and result in some cool pages.

A prime example is my first attempt at transference.  The notion of image transference seems simple enough.  This is where you take a image printed on computer paper and press it into a background page covered in either gesso or gel medium.  You rub it down and then peel the image up and ta-da the image is now on your background.

However, it doesn't always work out this easily, for I did as I described above but when I pulled the image up it was a gloppy mess of distorted color and gel medium.  Obviously, I missed something, but I was currently left with a very messy page. 

I scraped as much of it off as I could.  I then doused the page with a smattering of watercolors, but the left over muck was still noticeable, so I pasted a piece of tissue paper over the offending area, then smothered it with blue acrylic paint and gesso.  Now that most of the mess was camouflaged I decided to add something else to re-direct the viewers' focus.

What I chose to add was a purple leaf stamp.  This is a stamp that I actually created from craft foam I purchased at the local craft store.  I then painted  it purple and pressed it onto the page.  The result was surprisingly nice based on how it originally turned out. 

Sometimes mistakes make your creativity stretch much further than you ever knew it could go.