Playing around with acrylic & varnish

Hi everyone!

I recently watched a video on YouTube by Bella Rose Creative. She was experimenting with matte varnish and how it reacted with sprays on her journal which prompted me to have a play with it myself on my recent Ustream show (you can watch the recording by clicking HERE).

The first page I really loved how it turned out. I applied gesso to the page, sprayed 'greased lightnin' green' and 'edelweiss moss green' by Lindy's Stamp Gang, as well as Adirondack 'sunset orange' color wash. I then quickly squirted a good amount of matte varnish to the page and folded in half and 'squished' it together, opened it up and this was the result:

I'm glad I took a photo of it before I started playing with the page and adding more to it. I decided to sponge on some white gesso over The Crafters Workshop 'cosmic bubbles' stencil and the following photo is the result:

Next I used Dylusions 'black marble' spray ink and Adirondack 'red pepper' Color Wash, then squirted on a good amount of matte varnish, squished the page together and opened it up to reveal the following:

For the next page I used Tattered Angels 'fully purple' glimmer mist and Dylusions 'rose quartz' ink spray (forgot to take a photo before I added the titanium white over The Crafters Workshop 'blazonry' stencil). This is the result:

Next we decided to use Lindy's Stamp Gang Hawaiian Flat Magicals to see how they worked with the matte varnish. I used 'ocean breeze blue', 'aloha avacado' and 'magical mai tai'. The result was a bit disappointing, but at least we tried it!

For our next experiment we used Tim Holtz 'candied apple' and 'black soot' distress oxides. As predicted the page wasn't as vivid as the sprays, obviously because when the oxidisation takes effect it dulls the colours, but it's a different take on the technique.

We decided to take two separate pages, gesso them both, spray Dylusions 'black marble' ink spray and Adirondack 'red pepper' Color Wash then add the varnish onto only one of the geessoed pages then take the plain gessoed page and sit it on top of the sprays & varnish page and smoosh them together. Once separated they looked awesome!!!! Again I forgot to take photos until after I sprayed them with some Heidi Swapp 'gold' Color Shine

For our last experiment we used Edelweiss Moss Green Starburst Spray with Adirondack Sailboat Blue Color Wash, then the matte varnish and this is the result:

Now that was a lot of fun, and a LOT OF MESS to clean up LOL. But at least I now have a few page starters for my home-made journal 😀

Thanks so much for stopping by!

Smiles

Jen

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