Harlequin Grunge Background

This is another tutorial I wrote for my never-finished book.  This may be my very favorite background out of the whole book!

Materials needed:
Acrylic paints in black, tan and beige
Gesso
Black fun foam
White extra thick fun foam
Rubber cement
Black stamp pad ink

1.     Paint your page solid tan.  You can be messy as this is just a base coat for color.
2.    While the paint is still wet, use a paper towel to blot the paint and give it some texture.

3.    Again, while the tan paint is wet, apply black paint quickly.  Mostly apply it at the edges of the page.  Don’t make straight lines, we are going for the grunge look.

4.     When you’ve finished applying the black paint, add some beige in swipes all over the page- while the black is still wet.

5.     To create a stamp with the diamond or harlequin design,  use the pattern below
(RIGHT click on the diamond and save to your computer) as a template
to cut out eight diamonds from the black fun foam.

6.     Glue the diamonds onto the white fun foam with rubber cement.  Glue them in any pattern you like.  I arranged mine as two rows of four diamonds.  Trim the white foam close to the diamonds when your glue is dry.

7.     Ink your stamp with black ink.  I didn’t get the ink all over my stamp because I wanted a worn look.
8.    Stamp the design over the entire page.  The paint needs to be sewhat dry before you stamp.  I used my heat gun to speed up the process.  You can do it symmetrically as I did, or you can place the stamp only in certain areas of the page.

9.     When I finished stamping the design, while the ink was still wet, I coated the entire page with a wash of gesso.   This is done by mixing quite a bit of water with gesso.  This smeared the ink a little bit which gives it more of a grungy look.

In this photo, the gesso is still wet so you can see what a wet gesso wash looks like.  It’s thin enough that everything shows through.  It just subdues all the colors a bit.  But if you look at the photo of the finished page (top of this post),  you’ll see that when it dries it doesn’t have the white look to it.

If you make this background I hope you enjoy it as much as I did!

Just before I decided to focus on art to sell rather than more e-products, I had started writing a book on creating art journal backgrounds.  I’ve decided to share these techniques with my readers as tutorials.  Here is the first one using cut-out letters on your background.

Cut out letters

Materials needed:
•    magazines
•    letter stencils or die-cut letters
•    craft knife or scissors
•    acrylic paint
•    water soluble crayons ,oil pastels, watercolor pencils, or plain colored pencils
•    baby wipes or damp cloth
•    glue stick

1.    Select magazine pages that have interesting patterns, color or text.

2.    Trace the outline of each letter you’ll be spelling onto different magazine images you have chosen.

If you don’t want the lines of the pen or pencil you are using to trace, showing up on the front of your letters, trace them backwards on the back of the page.

3.    When all the letters are traced, cut each one out, using a craft knife.  You can use scissors if you prefer.

4.    Select an acrylic paint that goes with the magazine patterns you have chosen for you letters. Paint a page in your journal with the one solid color.

5.    Create a simple image on the page.  I made a bird silhouette and colored it in with water soluble oil pastels, but you could use watercolor crayons, watercolor pencils or just plain colored pencils if you want.  After I colored it with the pastels, I used a baby wipe to smooth the pastels around for a smoother look.

If you’d like to use a bird, also, you can click on this picture and it will take you to the original image that you can download.

6.    Decide how you want to arrange your cut-out letters on the page.  Once you’ve made this decision, glue them on with a glue stick.