It's April!

   Hi everyone. Happy new month to you. It's April. Wow. I feel like the last 3 months have kind of blended together into winter, so I'm excited for a new month when it might actually be spring. 😏

   The new month means a new challenge over at Art Journal Journey. First let me thank Chris and her Spring Forward challenge. I had a lot of fun making pages and seeing everyone's too. Thank you everyone who joined in, bringing a little bit of spring into  a month where winter was trying to hold on as long as possible. (I know that might not be true for all of you, but it was true here in New Hampshire where I live.)

  For this new month we admins want to welcome a new AJJ host. Gillena is a first time host with us at Art Journal Journey. Gillena is the talented artist behind the blog Lunch Break where she shares some of her  digital art including Sunday Post Cards and some digital art journal pages. Thanks for joining us as host here at AJJ Gillena.

   This month Gillena chose the theme Trees Are Awesome, Aren't They?

   I'm excited to look at trees in different viewpoints this month, and for my first journal page I went with some simple basic trees. To create them I used some acrylic paint, and to outline the different treetops from each other I used a black Stabilo pencil with some water to smear it around a bit. I also used a brown Stabilo pencil to give the trunks some details. I painted the sky and the grass.

   On the left and right tree I added a bit of texture by using some Stampendous Fran-tage  green fragments.  I'd never used  Fran-tage before, but I found a bottle marked down and they looked interesting. Since the colored pieces made me think of leaves, I picked up a jar. I tried them out here. I really like the texture they add, and they work especially well on the  left hand tree because I think they do look a lot like individual leaves.

     Here's a photo of what these Fran-tages are, although they must be an older item (as I believe Stampendous is no longer in business), and the only photo I could find online is some yellow ones. 

     On the center tree I took some pink metallic-paper flower trim and snipped the flowers apart. After I added the sitting girl (an Art by Marlene punch out), I created a bouquet for her hands with the same flowers. I added a few hand drawn leaves to her bouquet. She'd been holding a heart originally. 

     I also took some snipped flowers and some of the other bits that otherwise would be trash (from when I snapped the flower border apart) and put them on the grass part of this piece to look like petals that had fallen. 

   To wrap up my page I added half a silver metallic sun above the tree tops. I had painted it yellow and then partially sanded it because I thought it looked too blobby otherwise.

   Finally I stamped  some words ( hello and sunshine)  and a quote all from a couple of different Paper Artsy sets. 

   And I must mention the dreaded rules. Please remember we are an art journaling blog. You should have an art journal page to join us. And please, no cards, tags, ATC's, or other art forms unless they are part of a journal page. However, we do accept any type of art journaling whether you use paint, pencils, a computer, cloth, paper, photos, stamps, etc. 

   I  should also mention that your link ups should be through blogs and not social media. I know a lot of you make fantastic pages and share them on social media, but for us to comment we need to be able to link into that social media, and none of us belong to every social media page there is. 

   I hope you all are as excited as we are to welcome Gillena, and I am looking forward to only making tree inspired art but seeing a lot of trees this month.