Heart Flip

Watercolor, stamp pad ink, gesso

The Plan:

The prompt was "flip". Also, the week before, the gals in my art journaling group, were talking about how we each have such a distinctive style. I said, "I bet we could each do an index card and put them in a pile and we would all know who did which card". Someone said, "Lets do it!", so we did. I didn't want them to instantly know it was my card, so to turn up the heat with the game I avoided doing things I always do. It was a good stretch. 

When it came time to guess, we mostly got them right, except for two. It made me look more closely and think about how each artist in our group creates. 

For the flip I had the idea to do circles and reverse color/texturing for the foreground and the background. It was a neat design challenge to have the composition and the heart stencil work with both the flip open and closed.

The Surprises: Painting with black watercolor over the gessoed card gave some beautiful accidental blossoms, similar to using salt. I then went over those areas with some silver stamp pad ink.  I loved how it came out. I liked composing with clouds of gesso applied with a fingertip and making grass with watercolor applied with  piece of cardboard.