Take Me Deeper in April

April, the month of Resurrection...at least this year it is as Easter came on the first Sunday.  I love Spring when nature wakes up and sends out green shoots where there was only sleeping brown. I love the green, the flowers the perfumed air (although the pollen pays havoc with my nose). So lovely in many ways. I try hard to enjoy spring even though I know that the heat and humidity of summer is quickly approaching.  Summer is my least favorite season!!!

My April calendar and Logos365 LOVE page were just kind of haphazardly done. I am not proud of that, but sometimes I need to get something done to get to the next thing, ya know? So I just smudged Gelatos on the pages and smeared it around with a wet wipe. Drew on my lines/words and then colored the LOVE page with Koi Watercolor Markers. I have a terrible time with paint getting on the back of the page I am working on....so they often get messy looking. I haven't quite figured out what to do about that. I always put paper under the pages I am working on. I will keep trying to find the best way to do this.

I had trouble with an image for the first week of April. I don't know why but all I could think of that I wanted to do was flowers....so I went with flowers and Romans 6:4.  I coated the page with gesso, sanded it smooth and then painted with Twinkling H2Os.  Wrote the words with a black pen and used a white Sharpie paint pen to outline the flowers and doodle vines. I struggle to write in the fold of the page, so the writing isn't as neat as I wanted. I am thinking that this would be much easier on single pages rather than in a bound journal.

TMD April week 2: To begin this page I revisited the first lesson in Shonna Bucaroff's  His Kingdom Come Workshop with the masked off cross on the page that had been painted and stamped. I used the scriptures Galatians 2:20 and Ephesians 2:4-5...although I now see that I have the wrong reference for the Ephesians passage. I will have to figure out how to correct that.  I added some flowers and dragonflies that I cut from an old art magazine, mainly because I wanted something more on the pages, and because of all the beautiful Magnolia trees that were in bloom the week I was working on it....and dragonflies, um...just because. hehe...

 TMD April week 3: Power for Living! I love, love, love!!! the Ephesians 3:14-21 prayer. I have prayed this often for myself and for others, and I pray it for you. I am re-memorizing this so that I can pray it from memory.
I thinned down gesso and coated the pages, let it dry and sanded it pretty smooth. I watercolored a floral-ish background in soft colors (Koi Watercolors) and then added my words. I had a terrible time getting rid of my pencil marks, and some letters smeared here and there, but the scripture is what I wanted to shine.

April week 4: A Living Hope For this page I just wanted to see how my Twinkling h2o watercolor paints would do on the plain paper of my art journal. It is quite different than on a gessoed page and of course they don't react at all like they do on watercolor paper. I sketched on flowers and leaves and just painted them. For the background I diluted and add watercolor to gesso then spattered the page....because I like to spatter!  The scripture is 1 Peter 1:3-4a written with a black marker. I have been putting masking tape down the center of the pages in my journal so that watery paint doesn't find itself on pages it isn't suppose to be on. Ungessoed tape doesn't accept paint very well. lesson learned...

Many blessings, Zuda Gay Pease