Summer of Colour 4 - Red Red Gold

Its already week 4 at Summer of Colour where we have to create anything we like using the colours of the week which are 2 shades of one colour plus one other colour.  This week was a real challenge, we had to use red, red and gold!  Now I love red, but 2 reds?  Challenge was the  name of the game!

I wanted to use stencils because that is what the current challenge is at PaperArtsy but actually mainly because I love stencils and use them on nearly everything!

After a promising start stencilling a wall in black, white and gold the page quickly became one of those pages where everything goes wrong!  I wanted to use my favourite PaperArtsy flower stencil Jofy 009 with my home made texture paste tinted in one of the reds. Also to do the bump technique which Leandra showed in a video where you stencil a dark colour first, then move the stencil just a little and use a lighter colour giving a lovely shadow.  My first layer was black.  Then the trouble began.  The texture paste was too runny because I used too much paint and I had started on the left hand side of my journal where the textures on the previous pages were giving me a bumpy surface - not good for texture paste!  My bump shadow effect was distinctly blurry.  Next, I added my second red to the flowers and hated it!  So I covered it in gold.  Anyway, enough already, I kept going and this was the final result:

I went around some of the flower parts with a black pen to bring back some of the shadow effect:

I like to have crisp edges when I'm using my texture paste but sometimes you just have to go with the flow.  I wrote the words on paper painted with the dark red and added the splatters and spots in the other red. 

Sometimes our old preconceived ideas or ingrained habits prevent us from growing or developing and we need to sweep them aside to learn something new.

I had way too much texture paste left so scraped the remainder on the facing page.  Obviously still very much in red mode I painted all over it with the bright red - did I really want to do another page for this week's colours?!  Yes!  My first page only had a bit of red, I needed to go really RED, or RED RED:

I painted the flowers in the dark red, added gold through a stencil and for the flower centres, and black through a dotty card which I also used as a stamp to get the reverse:

I outlined the flowers to lift them:

And the words?  Well I used to be a perfectionist, but I'm learning to simply enjoy the process.  Not quite there yet but I've made big progress!

I'm linking up at:
PaperArtsy - Stencil challenge
Summer of Colour at Twinkle Twinkle
Art Journal Every Day
Creative Every Day