Toad in the Garden

Friday and Saturday afternoons were wonderful! I spent them working on my latest art journal spread – Toad in the Garden. Two weeks ago I described its beginning with the preparation of the masa paper background.

I planned to paint a toad in the lower right and create a floral frame around him. So I began my search for collage elements. One of my favorite sources is the Sundance jewelry catalog. It's such a beautiful thing and has gorgeous settings for the photos of the jewelry, with flowers and unique tidbits. The beginning was just these two bits, but they inspired me to paint a line branching coming from the branch in the little bottle and stretching across the masa paper. Then I added a few tiny leaves along the branch and some leaves falling below the pink flower - leaves whose shape and size mimicked those from the clipping itself.

By the way, when I added the collage pieces, I also sealed the entire spread with a coat of Liquitex Matte Medium. I was now working with acrylic paints.

Next, I added a few more pieces of collage - the blue flower on the upper right, the piece along the lower edge with the band starting with turquoise on the left to purple on the right, and the group of pink flowers in the lower left.

Then I painted the toad, which was a lot of fun. The sealed masa paper was a wonderful surface to paint on. And, surprisingly, the crinkles in the paper weren't a problem at all.

Then, I just kept fiddling - more collage, including leaves cut from magazine pages of the appropriate colors and the over-sized bee; some white paint smudged across parts of the textured paper; scribbly writing over some of the writing on the edges; and the gold paper bits.

Here's my pro tip! The gold is the wrapping papers from Ferrero Rocher candies. Sometimes making art requires sacrifices....