Circles on Stain

This is another piece that has taken a long time to be finished...years even. I have a box where I put pieces that I started on single sheets of art paper, but never finished. It might be because I was tired of working on it, but more likely life got in the way and I didn't have time to finish it. Every now and then I look through the box. Some things get thrown out because I know I will never finish them. Some things have been there for several years. Every once in a while I take one out to finish.

Several days before looking through the box, I had created a new background in my daily journal. I used a brayer to apply Mermaid Lagoon Distress Stain to a double page spread. I had just acquired a couple of the new Dylusions Paints to try out, one of which was Lemon Zest. I used an old library card to spread paint over parts of the stained pages. The yellow paint, of course, turned the stained areas green. I now had a blue, green, and yellow background.

As I was looking through my box, I found an unfinished mandala with the same colors I had used on the journal background. Bingo, an a-ha moment! I had drawn the basic mandala shape on watercolor paper and painted the big blocks of space with blue, green, and yellow Twinkling H2Os. It was at that point I had stopped. Just out of curiosity, I looked back in my old journals to find I was drawing lots of mandalas in 2012. Sometimes being a pack rat pays off. :-)

I outlined the mandala and cut it out. I tried it in different places on the page and decided to create more circles for a background. Using a stencil, I drew different sizes of circles. I made 3 blue rings and 3 blue-green solid circles. I used a stencil through a stencil to add the small white circles.

To continue my practice with glazes, I decided to make the blue rings appear 3D by using a darker blue glaze around the edges. I was trying different brushes to see which worked better and each layer was only adding a bit of color.

A layer of glaze has to be completely dry before you can add the next, and glazing liquid dries slowly. If you try to rush it, the new coat of glaze will remove any color that happens to be even a bit damp. So I set it aside and go onto something else.

I worked on the rings off and on for several weeks, but then non-art things needed to be done. The journal was closed and was only opened to this spread again this past Wednesday evening.

I added some yellow dots to the blue rings and to the mandala with Dina Wakley's heavy body paint and a pencil eraser. While they were drying, I used a previously scanned copy of the mandala to try out doodles before I did them on the real thing. I'm glad I did that because I tried a bunch of things before I figured out the leaves with a flower. I used various markers to add my doodles to the mandala. I did discover that some markers don't write very well on Twinks.

I used Prismacolor pencils to add shadowing to my background circles and rings. Scor-tape was used to secure the mandala to the background.

Supplies used:

• Strathmore Hardback Mixed Media Art Journal
• Distress Stain - Mermaid Lagoon (applied with brayer)
• Dylusions Paint - Lemon Zest
• circle stencils
• Amsterdam Standard Greenish Blue Acrylic
• Blick Matte White Acrylic
• Golden Acrylic Glazing Liquid (Satin)
• Golden Fluid Acrylic - Paynes Gray
• Dina Wakley Media Heavy Body Acrylic Paint - Lemon
• Twinkling H2Os on watercolor paper
• Sharpie Poster Paint Markers
• Montana ExtraFine Acrylic Paint Marker
• Gelly Roll Stardust Pens
• Sakura Gelly Roll Moonlight Gel Pen
• Prismacolor Pencils

Finished at last! It feels really good to finish something.