Birches on Kraft
Posted: March 9, 2022 Filed under: Alexandra Renke, Art Journal | Tags: Alexandra Renke, Art Journal 10 Comments
These two pages began as ‘clean up’ pages after completing pages in another art journal. I had some pink and brown paints left over and also some blue with brown. I used an old key card to lift the excess paint and swiped it onto the pages in my 6×6 kraft journal.
I didn’t have a plan straight away but a few weeks later I pulled out an Alexandra Renke stencil which I’d never used and decided to do a couple of simple landscape pages.
The stencil exposes only the edges of the birch trees which I wanted to be black so I mixed some black gesso with some black texture paste to make it thicker then spread it through the stencil onto the painted pages. Once it dried I painted the white spaces first with white gesso but it wasn’t opaque enough so I used Dr Ph Martin’s Bleedproof white paint.
After completing the trees I painted some snow covered hills with the same white paint and diluted them with water to reveal the land underneath. This is the opposite technique to my usual watercolour technique where I paint the shadows or hills and dilute the tops.
So far I have tried distress sprays, gel pens, acrylic paints and texture paste on the kraft pages. As long as I include some light colours in my designs the brown background words really well. Next experiment? Collage, stamping or maybe coloured pencils.
Supplies
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Heather Telford 
These are amazing pages! Love the background and the creative way you did the birch trees. I also enjoyed reading how you used the various products. These turned out amazing and thanks again for always describing your process.
Like the way these turned out. Very pretty.
Like the way these turned out. Very pretty.
Love these. It’s fun watching you pull out of your safe space and out into the world of mixed media. You have helped inspire me too that all prints are worth holding onto because they are just not finished yet.
Thank you
I am enjoying the world of mixed media so it is lovely to hear your encouragement. I went through a stage of saying to myself and my students ‘no card left behind’! If I didn’t like it one day I would leave it to look at another day. Then I modified that because I was saving way too many panels and then not doing anything with them. Now I am saving them again, not to ‘finish or improve’ but to cut up and incorporate into something new!
Truly appreciate your time and effort 👌 love your creations. ROSE GUERIN
The birch trees in black infilled with the white stand out beautifully against the kraft background Heather, and it goes to show that a clean up page with just some random sweeps of leftover paint can make a brilliant background and the added snow slopes using more of the white ink finish the whole scene amazingly. x
This looks great on the Kraft paper!
This is an amazing use of left over paints, Heather! What pretty scenes!
I see inspiration when I see inspiration ! 🙂 Gorgeius, so dramatic against the background.. super!