I've started work on an autumn layout for my Seasons out of Time journal project, and it is going to involve cascades of beautiful autumn foliage falling down the pages, and I wanted it to be bright and vibrant and in shades of orange, red, brown, and yellow with hints of green maybe. I decided to combine my Dylusions ink sprays and Tim Holtz Distress spray stain to get the colours I wanted, prepare a tag as a good surface then stamp on some leaves I could later cut out and glue onto the layout once it's ready and then they'll stand out and look beautiful. This layout is called "Les Feuilles Mortes" (the dead leaves) after the 1945 song, which was re-released in English translation in the same year of course as "Autumn Leaves" - obviously because the layout is based on falling, autumn leaves.
This is by no means a complete project, just one of maybe a dozen elements that will make up this layout, but it made a beautiful autumnal colourway and I wanted to share that.
STEP 1: I first sprayed the tag in a generous coat of Lemon Zest rather than spraying it with water - the wetness will help the brighter, darker colours to blend and will fill any gaps with a beautiful yellow.
STEP 2: I sprayed Tangerine Dream and Fresh Lime over most of the tag.
STEP 3: Immediately, I switched to the Distress spray stain and added Carved Pumpkin and Vintage Photo. As you can see from the photo above, they don't all sit 'equally' on the page. The reason: Distress stains have a different density and hydrophobicity to the Dylusions products. To analogise firstly ionic strength. If you were to mix a very salty solution with pure tap water, you'll get all sorts of swirling and mixing and clear mixing lines visible in it (Schlieren as the Germans call it) - you can try it out and see - this is because one has far more salt dissolved in it and thus when it mixes with the other, they try and equal out and the salt tries to move around and equilibrate it - that's owing to both liquids having different densities - if you dissolve 200g of salt in 1,000mL water, then 1mL of that water has a mass of 1.2g (1mL water = 1g, plus the 0.2g salt in every 1mL), therefore, it has a density of 1.2g/mL - in short, they will try and equal out and you'll see mixing/swirling/etc happen, or, if they were mixed more slowly, the water will sit on top of the salt water and form separate layers. Hydrophobicity is a measure of how much something wants to adhere to surfaces and not be in a water-based solution - in this context, it's really a measure of "does this dye molecule want to be joined to paper or in solution?" - so what happens is that one of them adheres rapidly to the paper, one of them more slowly.
What does this mean in practice? It means you get amazing patterns - you get the two different products mixing slowly and naturally and producing mixes of colour in close proximity without making mud.
STEP 4: I left it without touching it at all to dry for 24h and it looked beautiful! I then stamped the open/spotty leaves stamp from the Branching Out set onto it with Wendy Vecchi's beautiful Potting Soil Archival Ink - this is an oil-based ink so it won't lift the products underneath. I didn't apply it perfectly - I wanted a rough look. When my journal pages are ready, I will cut out all the whole leaves and adhere them to the pages individually. I LOVE the colours this has produced! Every leaf is totally unique and has texture and usually 2-3 colours. I had planned to stamp with some random texture over this to add interest but I really don't need to now!