Acrylic and Watercolor Bird Journal Pages

This morning I watched part of a Bush concert on television.  I really enjoy some of Bush's songs, like Glycerine and Come Down.  Given that Gavin Rossdale is their lead singer, I listened to some songs I don't really care for.  During this time, I reflected back to the 90's and when I was in love with Nirvana.  The song plateau entered my mind and I haven't been able to shake the only few lines of the song I know.  So I figured why not and decided to let Nirvana be my muse for the day.  

I had been wanting to try scraping acrylic paints with an old credit card after getting the idea off of a YouTube video.  This is how I created the background of my page. To begin I sprayed my pages with a little water and a small misting bottle (the kind you find in the travel section at Wal-Mart) and applied black paint straight from the tube to both pages.  I then took my card and pushed the paint around. Once I got the black the way I wanted it, I applied Calypso Blue directly to the page and scraped it around.  I set my pages to the side to dry.  

While my pages were drying, I cut the little birds using my Cricut Expression machine, which I should add, is an excellent tool to have on hand.  I had the birds cut in less than 3 minutes!  Then I hand cut the leaves and flowers from scrap paper left from cutting the birds.  Then I hit my journal pages with an old hairdryer because I don't have a heat gun.  

After my pages were dry I gesso'd the tree onto my pages.  I added a little water to my gesso to make sure that it would be pretty translucent.  That dried fairly quickly because I used such a thin coat.  I then used a watercolor pencil to color over the gesso.  I was not neat in my application.  Using my water brush from my Koi set, I applied water over the coloring.  I was really impressed with the texture that the gesso gave my tree.  I am not sure if you can see the texture in my photos, but it is there.  Then I glued my leaves, birds, and flowers down using my Xyron 1.5 inch sticker machine.  The lyrics to the song are written in yellow, orange,  and purple Sakura Souffle pens (because I like the raised ink) and  a white Gelly Roll pen.  

To top this page off, I decided to create a mandala.  I used tanglepatterns.com to find tangles to use in my mandala.  I attached this to my journal using a paperclip.  There you have it... easy as pie!

If you have any question regarding techniques, products used, or opinions please comment below.  My blog is extremely new and so far I have had no feedback... so please let me know what you think! Thanks a bunch.