Floral Collage Page For Memory Book

“The most important thing a father can do for his children is to love their mother.” –Theodore Hesburgh – Reader’s Digest Quotable Quotes

Hi readers. Sorry it’s been over a week since I last posted. I was a little under the weather with a head cold. Thank God it wasn’t Covid-19 virus. One nice thing, though, is I finished the first memory book project I’ve been working on since June. Yesterday, I sewed the pages all together and today I started making the book cover.

A few days ago I had to tackle the subject of my father’s death and how to present that in the book. True the whole book has been about my father, but I wanted to tell how his death impacted me. I put it off for at least a day, which is weird since he’s been dead more than 35 years. In the end, I did a watercolor of a sunset over the Pacific Ocean where my father’s ashes were scattered and I wrote a little about how the news was delivered to me. Now that I think about it, again, I may add some thoughts. I may show that page in another post.

Today, though I want to talk about how to enhance a gel printed page to match content. Below is the sample page I designed.

 

 

Floral Motif Book Page

The original paper was decorated with the Gel print in greens and blues with a few ink splats of dark red and gold scattered about. I wanted the page to communicate joy because it was about my sister’s marriage. I used a floral stencil by Stencil Girl Products, tracing around the empty spaces. Then while the stencil was still on the paper, I colored in the spaces with Ranger Distress Crayons, using these colors: “Festive Berries”, “Seedless Preserves”, “Fossilized Amber”, “Rusty Binge”, “Peeled Paint” (green). Next, I used a small watercolor brush and painted on water which blended and dissolved the crayon marks. I found a heart stamp and used the stamp cover as a template which I traced around with a colored pencil. Then I used acrylic paint as a watercolor medium to add yellow to the heart shape and yellow background around the flower shapes. I wanted to bring some of the colors of the flowers to the top of the page to tie it all together. I wet the tips of the distressed crayons with a paint brush and added some splotches that looked like little abstract flowers. Then I used my watercolor brush to flick on yellow and bright green spray adding texture. The text was painted on in bright yellow and pink acrylic paint.

Here is another sample collage page.

Bottom half gel print, top half was an abstract watercolor depicting floral images. I wrote the little message with a creme-colored pastel paper scrap embellished with some green acrylic. Text is gray acrylic ink. The print is a copy of the original photo from my archives that I enhanced in Adobe Lightroom to add vibrance to the photo.

I hope you are enjoying these project shares. If you do, please leave a comment and it will be appreciated if you wish to share this site with your friends on facebook, instagram, etc.

KUDOS TO SUPPLIERS: 

  • Jim Holtz’s Ranger Distress Crayons – Set 2
  • Floral Stencil by Stencil Girl Products. 
  • Arteza Craft Acrylic Paints

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