It’s time to post the final ‘retrospective’  journal page, completed sometime in February I think.  My [previous] bad habit of forgetting to date my journal pages caught up with me and I now own, and use, an actual date stamp!  Hola!!

This is the page where I learned about using car polish over gel medium to stop pages sticking together.  [Thanks to Claudia Rossi – again!]  The added benefit, as you will see, is that the sheen adds to the wet look I was trying to achieve.

The first thing I did was cover the pages with various shades of paint in blues and watered down reds  and drag the colours downwards with a variety of makeshift instruments as I was trying to achieve the impression of falling rain.  It actually looked really effective until I started applying the mod-podge when, of course, the water reactive thing occurred and I lost my lovely down-pour!  Never mind – live and learn is the motto of the hit or miss crafter!

The house shapes were cut from old encyclopaedia paper – I like my art work to look learn-ed!

I used stains and paints to colour the houses and hit them with a ‘crackle’ stamp to add texture.

I die-cut the clouds from more book paper, stamped the winged flock and made the text using my trusty ‘Dymo‘ label maker.

This side retains some of the downpour texture I was trying for:

Tim Holtz stamps make another appearance, I stamped the rain man and the Model T onto tissue paper using black staz-on ink  and bunged them into place. My white gel pen outlined rain man:

I was feeling pretty contented at this point – and then decided to try the mod-podge and car polish effect.  As soon as I hit the page with the medium the colours started moving and blurring – I worked as quickly and lightly as possible to try and minimise it, but as I said before, I lost my downpour effect.  When the medium was dry I raided the car cleaning kit and applied a liberal coat of car polish, buffing vigorously.  I really like this – the finished page shines with a wet look sheen that is really effective for the theme and the pages don’t stick together – an added bonus!!

See, I even put a date stamp on it…….. and that’s the end of the ‘house’ themed journal pages – for now any way.

It’s time to hit the play room and create something new.

If you stuck with it – thanks for dropping by and have a most enjoyable day!