Eileen Hull Designs - Comfort & Joy Day 8

Hi everyone and welcome. We need some fun in our lives right now so all of us at Eileen Hull Designs put our heads together and came up with an event that you can participate in as much or as little as you'd like. It's a challenge of sorts and we'd like to see you to make a Holiday Journal for this season using any of Eileen's dies. Your journal could include activities, photos, recipes, shopping lists, daily thoughts, etc. Really, it can include anything you want; after all, it's your journal!

Every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday between November 27th and December 23rd there will be a post in the Eileen Hull Fan Club from member(s) of Eileen's team members with a prompt for your journal. These prompts are meant to get your creative thoughts flowing and give you ideas for your Holiday Journal. It might be in the form of a blog post, Facebook Live, recorded video, or a Facebook post in the group. Then it's over to you to have some fun - we can't wait to see what you come up with, so please share your covers and pages with us in the Eileen Hull Fan Club.

Fellow team mate Elizabeth Robinson and I decided to share a theme for Day 8 of the event and came up with the idea of using a colour prompt to kick start out journal projects. We found this one called Frosted Flora over on the design-seeds.com website which has a collection of beautiful images and the colours to match them.

Here's the final journal page that I came up with using the prompt;

Thank you to everyone who took the time to watch my lopsided fb live flip through and explanation of the journal and this page - Eileen makes it look so easy! For my part practice is clearly needed lol :)

I promised a tutorial so here it is, beginning with my choice of paints to match the prompt as closely as I could. Alternatively you could pick papers, gel plate prints or other images that follow the same colours to create your page - it's your journal after all! It also occurred to me that the floral arch shape from Eileen's 'Floral Arch & Words' die set looked a lot like the stems in the image prompt which then gave me the start of a plan for the page.

I started by covering most of the two pages with the darkest of the greens (PaperArtsy's 'Hyde Park') using an old large brush. You get lovely textures using old brushes and there's no fear of damaging them either. You may spot that I put some plastic packaging behind the pages to protect the ones either side.

Next up I added a the lighter green, PaperArtsy's 'Khaki', over the top using a smaller brush and less paint to ensure some of the darker colour beneath showed through.

Another layer, this time with PaperArtsy's 'Concrete' that adds a little light grey to the surface. Although it looks like the colour is being lost you are in fact adding depth and interest to the finished pages.

Referring back to the prompt the main colour in the image is white - that background of crisp snow, so I added some smudges of Seth Apter's 'Avalanche' Izink Pigment Ink because it is semi-translucent when spread thinly so you don't lose what is underneath.

To introduce the winter feel I stencilled in some stars with a white gel pen. Later on I decided to add some sparkle over the top with another gel pen.

A focal point was needed for this journal spread and so I used the chosen paints to pull a few prints onto copier paper using a little 3x5 Gel Plate. If you look closely at the green one on top you'll see there's what looks like the imprint of branches on it - to recreate this you'll need a mid green coloured print (or even coloured paper if you like). Die cut some of the floral arches, lay them onto your Gel Plate in the pattern you want, apply a thin layer of white paint or gesso over the top with a brayer and while it's still wet put the mid green paper on top. Smooth over and lift while the paint is still wet and you should get that 'shadowed branches' effect. This forms the background of the tree panel.

The die cut floral arches, once removed from the Gel Plate, were painted with some of the darkest green paint.

After sticking the painted 'branches' over the shadowed ones (offset so you can see the printed ones underneath) I decided to make them look less like die cuts and more like drawings. One way to do this is to draw around the edges as unevenly as possible, first with a black pen and then with a white pen.

You'll see below on the finished journal page how this panel was added to the page with a bit of purple paper underneath and some tea stained paper bits either side. To create the baubles I die cut some of the floral bits in the centre of the arch, painted them with PaperArtsy's pale purple/pink 'Taro Milk Tea' paint and stuck them onto/below the branches. After adding a bit of sparkle and Glossy Accents I drew lines to look like the ribbons tying them to branches above.

On the second side of the journal I used some of the left over bits of purple and green paper with a bit of old lace to carry the design through. The word 'moments' is included as one of the dies in the Floral Arch & Words set and after die cutting it I painted it with some PaperArtsy 'Squid Ink' paint.

So that's how my page for the Comfort & Joy event came together, all starting with the colour prompt from design-seeds.com.

Elizabeth will shortly be bringing you her clever ideas on using Eileen's Mitten die to create interactive elements, also following the colour prompt. We both hope you have a go at using it to create something in your own journals and in your own way. And make sure to keep checking in the Eileen Hull Fan Club group for the rest of the event days as there's still more in store to encourage and support you.

For now, thanks for visiting,
Jenny xxx