Happy Wednesday, y’all!  It’s Dale Ann back with another page in my Paper Doll Palace art journal.  Today I’m showing you how to bring some depth and dimension to your pages using the Haute Mess Molding Paste.  I have to say, this is my absolute favorite of the medium line.  And since it has been so well loved, I only had a teeny tiny bit in the bottom of my jar to work with. I know, total sadness.  So I decided to create a page that would use it in an interesting way that would let you see it in action!  My page today is simple, but I really love how it turned out.  I hope you do too.

The Process

First I started with a plain cardboard page in my journal.  I wanted a dramatic page, so I decided to mix together some of the Haute Mess Make It Rain with some black acrylic paint.  This gave me a moody and dark bluish gray. Perfect for what I wanted to do.  I mixed it on the page with some of the Haute Mess Clear Gesso.  Then to create some texture I used my spatula and moved it around the page touching down and lifting up to get some stippling.  I then covered this layer with Matte Gel Medium.

My next move was to stencil a damask pattern all over the page with some Haute Mess Grunge acrylic paint.  Once that was dry, I put down another layer of Matte Gel Medium.  This gave it a kind  of dreamy, cloudy look and softened the pattern.

I decided that the pattern was still a little too much, so I added water to my mix of Make It Rain and black paint.  This allowed me to put a watered down color wash across the whole page, darkening it up.  Again, I put down a layer of Matte Gel Medium.

After that layer was dry, I diluted some of the Haute Mess White Gesso with water, and used that to splatter all over the entire page.  I did get a little impatient, and added my layer of Matte Gel Medium too soon, and it caused some streaking in a couple of places.  But I went with it!

Now it was time to pull out the Molding Paste and a new stencil that I had recently won from istencils.com.  It’s a bird on  a branch with leaves around it.  I decided I only wanted the bird, so I used masking tape to cover the areas I didn’t want to get Molding Paste into.  I used my trusty spatula to scrape it across the stencil, and carefully lifted it off.    Then I had to make sure and let this layer dry completely!  Once dry, I took some more Grunge paint and painted a branch for the bird to rest on, and added some berries in Haute Mess Torrid.  I also made some dark marks on the branch with a pencil and a white gel pen to look like snow.  I finished the page off with a quote I took from the book, The Little White Bird, by J.M. Barrie.  “For to have faith is to have wings.”

A Final Look

Well, that’s it for me today. I hope you had fun and that you’re inspired to order some Haute Mess Molding Paste and get creating some fun dimensional elements on your next page! See you next Time!

Dale Ann