It started when I sold my desktop computer and bought a laptop.  The laptop had windows Vista.  My scanner is not supported by Vista.  HP doesn’t have new drivers for Vista for my scanner.  I no longer have a desktop to use the scanner with.  THEN, we have misplaced the wife’s camera.  Now, the ONLY thing I can find to upload images with is my wonderful phone.  Don’t get me wrong, I love my phone.  I upload photos here all the time that I took with my phone.  As a matter of fact, I haven’t used the scanner or the wife’s camera in months.  That’s how it got lost.  Anyway, the problem here is that I really want you to see the detail in this journal entry.  Inspired by Leslie Herger’s Comfortable Shoes blog where she plays with her new spray bottles full of ink and creates a fall scene.  After last week’s fun with the spray bottles, I wanted to try a masking piece too.  So here is this week’s entry, Fallen.

After I coated the page in gesso and let it dry, I went to the recycling bin and grabbed some junk mail to make masks with.  I started with just some longish pieces laid across the pages.  Then I sprayed the pages with yellow acrylic poster paint and water.  I mixed this last week by adding a tsp. of paint to a 1.5 oz. spray bottle from Wal*Mart, and filled with tap water.

You can see that without some type of adhesive, the masks curl up when sprayed.  I left some of them this way and others I pressed down with rubber cement.  Then I added cutout shapes of leaves and began using various other colors.  After the yellow, I used a light coat of red to give off an orange.  Then I came back with a darker layer of red.

I finished off the spraying outside with some brown, blue and green.  This is probably my favorite part because one of the first mediums I experimented with was spray paint.  I never “tagged” a train or a water tower, or even a bridge for that matter.  But I did quite a few “Starry Night” scenes on wood planks and some friend’s barns.  My mother has one that I did on canvas of a cat and full moon done completely with spray paint.  Maybe I can get a post of that sometime.  But I digress.  I love the spray paint effect!

While the paint was drying I found a potato that was a bit overripe in the pantry.  I drew out a couple of quasi-leaf shapes and tried to trace them onto the cut potato.  There HAS to be a better way to do that.  I believe that if I ever do that again, I will just find a marker capable of drawing on potato.  The paper just shredded.

I managed to cut the shapes into the potato and spread a little poster paint on the wax paper I was using to keep the over spray off the rest of the book.  Then I used the potato stamps all along the top of the journal in yellow, red, orange, and green.  My beautiful young bride gave me some of her pthalo green to play with.

I love this shade of green!  I mixed some water into it and spread drops all over the pages that I blew around with a straw to make it crawl across the page.  The One Minute Muse gives an outstanding demo of this technique.  I even stood the pages upside down and drizzled pthalo along the “bottom” of the journal to let it run up into the pages.

This is when I discovered that I had done the whole thing upside down in my journal.  LOL!  If I want upside down pages in my journal, then so be it!  I used my nifty little sharpie pen to draw in some detail on the trees and the leaves, and sprayed the edges with some black paint.  I was finished.  I couldn’t think of anything else I had that I wanted to do with this.  I wasn’t all that excited about it, but it wasn’t bad.  Later that night, back at Wal*Mart, I found SPRAY GLITTER!  I LOVE LOVE LOVE the effect that has on this.  And I can’t find a camera to do it justice!  I think that when I do, I will take really good pix of this and some previous works, including the cat that my mother has and post them here in a gallery all their own.