Week 21: Soft Fluffy Paint Effect

It’s Week 21 of the 52-Week Art Journal Journey, and I need to tell you about the fun I had last week in the Art Journal Background Challenge with Ivana Zoza of Artful Haven! which you can see some of here I’m so excited to share her technique for a soft fluffy background. Or at least my take on it. It’s perfect for the 52-Week Art Journal Journey because it’s relatively quick (feel free to take as much time as you want/have), and a few common materials… most of which are optional. And we get to play.

It’s time to get the acrylic paints back out, and a paintbrush… and your fingers. Y’all know how much I enjoy getting my fingers in the paint… on purpose.

I also used…

some book-page scraps…I’ll warn you they’re there for texture, unless you do something very different than I did; I wanted to retain the text when I started, but that didn’t work with the rest of the process… That being said, any type of scrap paper will do.
a glue stick
a toothpick
a plastic milk jug cap (which I misidentify as an orange juice cap in the video)
a kitchen sponge
a fine, soft, long-bristle brush… for paint splattering… Yup, smiling over that one, too.

If you’d like to jump to the video, scroll on down… You’ll find an invitation to learn more, directly from Ivana, not filtered through me, there, and later on here. So excited! And if you don’t yet receive my weekly bit of extra creative self-care encouragement, this may be the perfect time to sign up… because… who doesn’t love a discount?!? You can also sign up for Ivana’s Artful Haven FREE PRINTABLES by clicking here.

Getting started

Okay, first things first. Our colors. We’ll be doing quite a bit of blending, so remember to be careful with secondary colors. Shades and tints of our primary colors (red, yellow, blue) are safe. Purple and yellow, or orange and blue, or red and green, may look interesting next to each other, but are likely to make mud if mixed. As I mentioned in the Week 18 watercolor play video, mud isn’t always a bad thing, BUT… it doesn’t belong here.

As we’re going for a soft, fluffy effect, you don’t want your colors to be too dark. But, as we’re blending with white, you don’t want to go to light, or you’ll lose them.

We’ll need a darker color later.

A pink, a blue, and a yellow are ideal to start.

If you choose to use a background with paper scraps for texture, your first step is to tear them and glue pieces creatively around your page. The tearing is important for texture. I probably would have laid mine out differently if I’d had a better picture in mind of where I’d be going… If you’d like to keep things simpler, or just use the sponge-texture I use, or something else, you can easily skip the paper. It’s all about what you’d like to experiment with.

As this is a project in which I give you more steps with more details, I’m finding it difficult to put it all in words without images, which I don’t have time to edit in right now, so I’m going to drop the fun links where you can learn more about Ivana Zoza and Artful Haven, and the Art Journal Recipe Course here… and follow up later with the step-by-step here. I love creating the Art Journal Journey for you, but it requires almost as much time as my part-time job at the library… and I’m out of “free time” this week.

As mentioned above, you can sign up for FREE PRINTABLES from Artful Haven.
Artful Haven on YouTube
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Video overview of Art Journal Recipe
Art Journal Recipe on Teachable
I’m looking forward to getting started on the Art Journal Recipe to learn and improve various art-journaling skills that go further than our fun quick prompts designed to encourage you to reclaim your creativity, and establish a healthy habit of creative self-care. If you’re ready to jump in and learn the basics of a more mixed-media more-surface-covered style of art journaling, I invite you to join, too.

You’ll get to learn more about projects like the one in this in the video. Let’s make the this week’s soft fluffy art!