EXPERIMENTAL PLAYTIME: AUTUMN ASPENS

I've spent the last couple of days playing with a Jane Lafazio tutorial that I downloaded from Cloth Paper Scissors. It's all about textured backgrounds and transparent foregrounds. Jane made her "bumpy, lumpy, nubby" backgrounds by covering pages with a variety of papers, fabrics, tags, etc. I was in a hurry to get started, however, so I just used a page that was already in my journal, where I had squirted a bunch of paint and spread it around with a credit card.

I added some more acrylic paint, in more colors, to one like this.

The next step was to create a transparent focal point by making some black ink sketches on sheer paper. I didn't have any artist tissue on hand, or at least, none that I could find, so I just grabbed my kitchen parchment paper. The colors reminded me of aspens -- not something that grows around here, but something I remember from my family's yearly trips to Colorado -- so that is what I sketched. I made several different sketches, on small bits of parchment, then played around with how I wanted to arrange them on the page. Once I was satisfied, I started gluing them down with gel medium, and that's where I ran into a bit of trouble.

I couldn't get the tissue to stay smooth!  Jane advised that the trick to having the tissue dry transparent was to get the piece totally saturated with glue. Well, the only one of my four sketches that stayed even semi-smooth was the one with the least amount of glue on it, and guess what? Not only was it not at all transparent, the next day it popped back up off the page! So I slathered it with glue, wrinkles be damned.

I've almost got myself convinced that the wrinkles actually give the trees great wood-like texture.

Still, I can't help wondering how, even though I was layering over a nice smooth under-layer while Jane was layering over all that nubby textured stuff, her pages all ended up looking as smooth as glass in the photos!