Happy 100th Country View Crafts!!!

Hi everyone and welcome. It's a really special month over at the Country View Crafts Challenge blog because they are celebrating reaching the 100th challenge milestone - what an achievement that is! Huge congratulations to Susan, her team and all the designers who have worked so hard behind the scenes over the years to make it happen and inspire you with so many wonderful projects.

Lots of fantastic designers have queued up to offer their congratulations and share a little something as part of the celebrations. This is my contribution - can you spot the hidden 100?

Following on from an initial foray into the world of urban sketching last month (a book of Venetian architecture that can be seen HERE) I moved on to making a start on documenting some of the places visited during a family trip to Southern France a few years ago. The first couple of pages featured my take on views of the castle walls at Carcassonne (these can be seen HERE).

Since then I have experimented with different ways to combine sketching the buildings with collage elements and pops of colour, seeing what works best for me. This time, rather than using simple pencil sketching and shading, I decided to combine three shades of blue PaperArtsy Fresco Finish Paints (Wolf Eye, Blue Smoke and Surf's Up) to add detail and dimension to the drawing of the old church in the village of Montblanc (in the Herault department).

You'll see how the darkest has been used to add deeper shading with the mid and lighter tones blending out towards the highlighted areas. I also added a little Snowflake Paint to strengthen those highlights. A permanent black marker has then been used to re-draw the lines, deliberately keeping it simple to allow the various shapes of the buildings to become the main focus.

I used stamps to enhance and embellish the sketch, applying them over the layers of collage papers and painted wet strength tissue. The images come from Sara Naumann's PaperArtsy stamp set ESN52, including the rows of zeros - have you spotted the 'hidden' 100 in there? Using different colours of permanent ink with them helps to prevent them overshadowing the painted building and also allows for the details of each one to remain visible even when they are stamped and layered over one another.

The phrase from Alison Bomber's PaperArtsy stamp set EAB12 'Travel & Journeys' seemed apt, both for the first page of this journal as the experiments continue, and for the Country View Crafts Challenge blog which has reached an amazing milestone one challenge at a time. The layers of lace beneath help to make it stand out; not only has some of the paper been stained with a combo of dilute tea and a sprinkle of Rocky Road Infusions to get that pale berry hue, some of the lace has been dyed with it too. My tip if you want a subtle colour is to thoroughly mix the Infusions with water to activate the dies and Walnut crystals, soak your lace in the mixture to allow it to be absorbed and then rinse off the excess in running cold water.

That's it for this journey into Southern France. I hope you've enjoyed finding out how the page came together and look forward to sharing more of the pages with you soon.

In the meantime please do make sure to check out all the blog posts this month over on the Country View Crafts Challenge blog. A big thank you to Susan for inviting me to be a part of the celebrations. I am so looking forward to getting back to going to workshops so a return trip to her wonderful shop and fabulous workspace can happen.

For now, thanks for visiting.

Jenny xxx