Hi everyone, happy Sunday! I have been away from all devices and buried deep in the stash trying to make things more user friendly but it’s a challenging job and it’s taking so much longer than I planned! I just stopped for the night and everything is still in a state of flux but before I log off I wanted to share this art journal page that I finished yesterday while I was taking journal breaks in between stash-moving episodes. A the challenges of being a multi-crafter, multiple arts and crafts equal multiple stashes! People who do not have such hobbies just don’t understand lol.
This month, Country View Challenges are celebrating their 100th challenge and so the challenge this month is to feature the number 100 somewhere on your project and also to be inspired by one of the DT projects. What a fun challenge!
Today I have my fourth entry to this challenge and it’s an art journal page which was inspired by Jo’s art journal page.
I took the colours of the sky, the plants and the clouds from Jo’s page and used them as the basis of my page, though I used different techniques and products and instead of white clouds I have white butterflies. I chose this one because I loved the summery feel of it and for a change we actually had weather to match so it was lovely painting this scene and feeling the sun shining through the window (though it is now raining of course lol).
I started by painting the background with a lovely bright green and blue watercolour paints. Once the paint was dry I added some butterflies using some texture paste and a butterfly stencil. Unfortunately there are no photos of this step due to all the other work I had going on moving stuff and furniture around and I put the page somewhere safe to dry and then forgot to take a photo!
So the next photo I have is the one above, where I have already added the stenciled texture paste butterflies (30 of them) and started adding some colour and shading. I really wanted to somehow get 100 butterflies on the page so I ended up painting another 70 smaller butterflies onto the page lol. Feel free to count them if you like, I counted them three times to be sure lol. Oh and I also added some grass to the bottom of the page at this point.
To make the white blobs look more butterfly-like, I added some details with a black pen.
Here are all the butterflies finished and already in flight.
I added some wildflowers to the grass at the bottom of the page, and all that was missing was the quote!
This quote is from One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Márquez and it’s one of my favourite books from one of my favourite authors. If you like magical realism you might like it too. 🙂
…a sudden flapping of wings, it was the butterflies, as if they had suddenly been born out of light…
In the book, there is one character who is followed around by a cloud of yellow butterflies wherever they go. There is of course, some symbolism attached to this occurrence. I was tempted to make my butterflies yellow but we don’t really see yellow butterflies here very often, whereas these Cabbage White butterflies are very common. If you are wondering where the “100/one hundred” is written on my page, well here it is, as I wrote the author’s name and the title of the book under my quote.
Once everything was dry, I added the page into my art journal and held it open with some clips.
Let me know what you think in the comments. As always, thanks for reading!
Ingredients
watercolour paper, my usual journal, butterfly stencil, texture paste, white pen, black pen, paint pens, Pitt artist pens,
Challenges
Country View Challenges – 100 Challenges – Congratulations on 100 challenges! I was inspired by DT make by Jo (aj page)
Art Journal Journey – Butterflies – June Challenge – I added 100 butterflies to my page 🙂
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What a beautiful summer journal page!!! I love how you created the butterflies with the texture paste and how you highlighted them with the black shading!!! Thank you for joining the June challenge of the Country View Challenges!
A beautiful page Elle and thank you for linking to Mia’s theme at AJJ. It would be lovely to see a field of wild flowers with a multitude of butterflies over the them fluttering around
Fabulous page! Thank you so much for playing with us at Country View Challenges this month and good luck in the draw!
This is a beautiful butterflies page. It’s great how you paint that!
Have a beautiful Week, hugs -Elke
Wow, what a fabulous page Elle. I love the idea of 100 butterflies. I can just image being in a pretty summer field with all those butterflies flying around me. What an experience that would be. Thanks so much for sharing this with us at AJJ for Mia’s challenge. This page is a beauty for it. Happy new week. Hugs-Erika
Wow, what a stunning page! Thanks so much for joining us at Country View Challenges and using my page as inspiration ?. The colours and flower meadow look so magical with all those amazing butterflies, you created a 100 of them so beautifully too! Thanks again and wishing you a happy new week! Hugs, Jo x