Step by step journal spread

The past weekend I spent a lot of hours at my journaling table preparing spreads in my journal for writing. I will show those to you when they are fully finished. I am planning a journal spreads post on Friday.

But while working I thought it might be nice to do a post where I show the making of a journal spread from almost start to finish. I say 'almost start', because as you may remember I prep my journals ahead of time with paint so they have a little color on the page when I start working on them.

So here's a step by step photo shoot of one journal spread.

The spread started out very pink. It's acrylic craft paint rubbed on the page with a baby wipe!

I added tape to the top and bottom and some scrapbook borders to the center of the pages.

Then I got my wonderful paint markers and added a border of dots around the spread.

Time to go through my stash of magazine images and pick two focal images that seemed to fit perfectly together.

I added some words and outlined both text and images with a dashed line in green and white paint marker.

I decided to ad a dashed line alongside the central strips of scrapbook borders as well.

I wanted to bring out the green in the picture of the purse and added some bright yellow green washi tape.

Some pretty store bought stickers were added and the letters almost accidentally spelled 'keep'.

Time to ad some text of my own, inspired by the word 'keep'. I took some washi tape and a template and wrote.

I went over the writing on the tape with a thicker marker and taped the words onto the spread.

Wanting to ad some final details, I stamped some flowers on pretty paper and cut them out.

Those were added as a final touch and now I considered the page all done. Voilà!  All ready for writing!

And here's some details from the spread so you can see it more up close. It helps see the effect of the baby wipes better and the different colors of the paint markers as well.

Please let me know if you enjoy seeing these step by step demonstrations. I have another one in the making of a mixed media spread in my sketchbook (which is on hold right now, because the studio is too warm to work in), so you can look forward to that. It's quite easy and fun to do, so I wouldn't mind doing more of these if you're interested in my process. If you have any questions feel free to ask, I love answering questions about my work.

For now I wish you all a wonderful and artsy week!