July Sustainable Souls Project

Our Sustainable Souls theme for July was "Helping Nature Sustain - Honey Bees".

As soon as I saw the theme for July, I instantly knew what I wanted to do for my journal.

I started off with a scrap piece of cardboard and scraped Liquitex Gesso randomly over the one side.  I dried the gesso with a heat gun and then with a circle stencil, applied modeling paste in the middle to represent a honey comb.  After the modeling paste was dry, I applied a thin layer of Yellow Oxide acrylic paint and a wash all over the surface.

Once that was dry, I used modeling paste through a bee stencil I found on Etsy for my main image.  Once that fully setup, I used a mixture of gold, champagne and silver Inka Gold to highlight and make the bee stand out.

 

I felt the sides of the piece needed some balancing, so I used "the great equalizer", gesso (to quote my friend DeeDee Catron).  I took a pallet knife and scraped the edges and some of the circles to make them pop.

 

 

Once everything was completely dry, I mixed up equal parts of Alumilite Amazing Clear Resin and placed a few drops of Yarrow Ice Resin Tint and just a couple drops of Ancient Root Ice Resin Tint to give myself a warm yellow color.

I let this settle for a couple of minutes to let most of the bubbles disappear.
I then began to pour my resin all over the page randomly.

I let this cure for 24 hours and made up a smaller batch of the same resin combo and poured streaks around the entire page for more dimension.

To keep with my word of the year "BE", I pulled out some white rub-on letters and on the top right corner spelled out "BEe".  Last but not least I picked up my Stabilo Marks all pencil and drew some lines on each edge. I wet a paint brush and watered down the pencil marks for a grungy look.

Voila!  I have to say this is one of my favorite projects for this team.

Here is the final project and some yummy close-ups.

As I'm sure everyone has heard and read that honey bees are dangerously low and as of January 2017 they were added to the endangered species list.  There are many benefits of honey bees and the honey they produce so we need to do what we can to protect and flourish this helpful species.

Thank you for stopping by.