MAD SCIENTIST IN THE COLOR LAB

Well, I finally came up with a good idea for what I wanted to do in Denita's circle journal. I decided to do something involving my new poppy stamp and Dyan Reaveley's bleach out technique. That's the one where you first stamp an openwork pattern onto a background that has been sprayed with a dark-colored Dylusions ink spray...

brush water into the open spaces and "bleach" the color out by blotting with paper towels...

then fill a water brush with a bright-colored ink and paint that into the bleached out spaces.

Works fantastic on the super-smooth cardstock and manilla papers that come in the journal Dyan designed herself. However, I had no idea how it would work in an altered book journal, so I decided I'd better experiment in one of my own journals first, before attempting this project in one belonging to someone else.

First I tried it on plain book paper.

The colors remained bright and true, but soaked through the paper so quickly they didn't have a chance to blend, and no matter how much wetting and blotting I did, I could NOT get that green to bleach out of the flower petals.

Next I tried it on gessoed book paper.

I did manage to bleach most of the color out of the flowers this time, and fill them in with orange. But, as you can see, though I used the very same vivid colors here as in the first one, once they hit the gesso, they immediately morphed into namby-pamby pastels. Vehddy in-ter-resting, albeit somewhat disappointing. Ah well. Back to the drawing board!