Using gesso with stencils is a really fun technique with neat results for journal pages. For my first page I painted it with with water soluble oil pastels. Yes, you read me right – water soluble oil pastels!

First thing you need to do is to place your stencil over your page and apply gesso. You don’t need a whole lot of gesso, just enough to cover the stencil.

Then carefully remove the stencil and just like magic the image appears!

Before you go any further, wash the stencil right away. If you don’t, the gesso will dry and it won’t come off! Now you have to wait for it to dry. I usually leave it overnight.

For the next directions, I’ll have to show you a different stencil I used. I was so excited I didn’t take any pictures of that first stencil image being painted.

Now that the gesso is dry, wet your paint brush with water and apply to the whole page.

Then take the oil pastel, wet it with the paint brush and slide across the paper.

And the finished background.

Here is the other stenciled page. This one I used acyrlic paint that I again watered the paper down first.

And another one. This one (my first attempt) shows how I used too much gesso and it messed up the image. This one I used regular watercolors.

I am just learning to use the oil pastels. If you slide them across a dry page, you will have crayon-like lines, so it’s important to wet the paper and then wet the pastel stick unless you like that look. If you use these oil pastels, please feel free to comment and let me know how you use them.

Of the three ways to color these pages, I like regular watercolor best, but I enjoy experimenting with different mediums. Using watercolor seems to keep the gesso white.

Another day, just another fun way to make backgrounds for those journal pages.

Yesterday we had some strong winds. There was no rain, just wind. I watched from this desk as a large limb broke off of one of our trees. Later, I walked around our property to find this apple tree that was blown over by the wind.

We had planned to cut it down this year since it shades the cherries and hasn’t produced many apples. However, this year it’s full of them!! Luckily it didn’t fall on the cherry trees. Looks like a sawing party needs to be scheduled.