Puppy Love

This is my dog Kiki.  She is our 11 year old daschund, but this photo is when she was just a puppy. While cleaning out my craft room, I stumbled upon some old photos of my baby.  She is also known as my first daughter.  Little did we know that she is an alpha dog, so it took YEARS to train her that she was not the leader.

Now that Kiki is old, she is more mellow and easier to handle, but I do miss those puppy days when she was so cute!  

So I've been very interested in the art journal/steampunk look for a few weeks now.  I saw someone post an art journal cover from a class they took from Anna Dabrowska.  I gotta say, once I saw how cool her stuff is, I was hooked and became obsessed with finding more and more samples of mixed media art.  If you have time, check out all her projects.  She is also a designer for Prima and Prima will soon carry her line of products! Can't wait!

OK back to the project.  So I started by applying gesso to some watercolor paper.  Then I applied paste (Dreamweaver) to the brick mask (Crafter's Workshop) in two corners of the paper.  This photo shows it pretty good.

After that I cut out a clock from a Tim Holtz die out of acetate and applied white alcohol ink (Ranger) to the clock.  I didn't want the clock to stand out too much, but I did want people to see it, which I why I opted for acetate.  I was hoping that the white alcohol ink would then allow the sprays to color it up.

Then I adhered Kiki's picture and distressed mat piece behind it.  Then I began gluing on flowers and metal trinkets (Tim Holtz) around two corners of the photo and painted them with gesso. Then I covered the photo and started spraying with green, teal gold and brown sprays by Lindy's Stamp Gang.  I used all of the ones with shimmer inside since I wanted the metallic look.  I don't know if it was the gesso or something else I did but I don't think I should've done that.  My friend Tracy told me that she thinks it was the gesso and suggested I use gel medium.  I guess I gotta put that on my list of things to try next time.  I ended up using a lot of spray but the white kept showing through.  Anyone know if the gesso was the mistake or if I did something else wrong?

After I gave up on the spraying, I completely dried the paper and then added my Puppy Love title using black foam thickers.  Since my watercolor paper was not a full 12x12 size, I distressed the edges, and then adhered it to a kraft cardstock and distressed those edges too.  Then I mounted it on a 12x12 chipboard.  I've found that if I don't do that, the corners end up curling.

So I'm open to suggestions.. if you have any recommendations on what I should do to not have so much white resisting, let me know.  I guess I'll have to wait until I get me some gel medium before I attempt this again...

I just realized I'm posting this on Friday... Yay!  We made it to the end of the week! Ready for the long weekend?