More of Using Backgrounds for Art Journal Every Day

I am still trying to "use up"  backgrounds for Art Journal Every Day - I was planning on doing an ATC swap on atcsforall.com on the subject of "mermaids and friends" so I did some backgrounds on watercolour paper and in my Strathmore watercolour Journal to be nicely watery with an under the sea feel.

I wet the paper with a mister spray and added watercolours directly from the tube then splodged them around with a big brush and I also tilted the paper so the colours ran into one another...

In the end I did not use the paper for the swap as I drew my mermaids directly on to my atc size paper instead - but I did have a nice double page spread in my journal all ready to go.

I had a prompt I liked from the art journalling thread on atcsforall - "mermaid tales", thanks to smokeysmom!  Plus I had a head full of mermaid imagery and I also had a poem I wrote about Dahud, a Celtic mythological figure, which gave me my story.

I used some ready made stick on lettering for the title and some Dover alphabet letters for the Dahud name; these were black and white so I coloured them with water colour crayons.

I did an image transfer of the hippocamp sea horse, then I used the top of one mermaid and a tail from another in a book of Dover medieval images which again I tinted. I found the black and white musical merpeople from a copy of an old engraving and added them, and then I drew Dahud and gave her a pretty (but maybe a bit spiteful) face.

The poem is covered in layers of organza cut in wave patterns, while the text of the story is tinted with watercolour crayons.  Then there is some journalling in black pen and last of all a key sticker.

I have called it Mermaid Tales Number 1 - because that way I have to do some more!