Hello everyone! It’s time for me to explore the January Project Art kit and to share my ideas with you! This month kit contains a bottle of liquid frisket – masking medium, a 5×7 watercolour paper pad, foam brushes and bamboo skewers.

To use the masking medium you simply apply it – and there are a million possibilities on how to do this and on what surface to do this – let it dry, add paint on top and when the paint is dry you rub the masking medium away.

Apply the medium -here I used a stencil to create a simple pattern. If you use a regular brush – don’t use a fancy one because the medium dries quickly and it’s almost impossible to get it all out of the brush!

Let the medium dry completely and then add paint, I used some watercolour from the December Project Art kit.

Let the paint dry and then gently rub the medium away.

The first journal page I’m going to share with you today started out with these simple patterns, created by using one of the foam brushes.

I then added watercolour paint, using lots of water to let the colours blend.

I made some cute elements to decorate my page, by stamping “JAN” on a book page, using the stamp from the January Day in the Life kit. I then used the bird stamp on top of the previously stamped word, together with a versamark pad and clear embossing powder.

I cut the birds out…

…and stitched them onto my page (after rubbing the masking medium away). I also used the Day in the Life 2014 stamp set on my page, and coloured the numbers very loosely.

I added my journaling and some stitching around the edges of my watercolour paper, painted the edges of the page in my journal pink using mist and also splattered some of the same mist over my page and then glued the watercolour paper into my journal.

I was impressed to see that it was possible to use the masking fluid on the quite fragile book page too, without tearing the page. Here I used mist to colour the page.

For my next page, I started out directly onto my journal page, making some very random marks with the masking fluid. I used the bamboo skewes to drag the medium out into thin lines.

I then added watercolour paint.

After rubbing the masking fluid away, I especially loved the tiny patterns made by the bamboo skewers!

I decided to add some stamping to my page, using the numbers stamp.

Next I added some acrylic paint. I used a stencil, but I also smeared some paint out using a palette knife.

I added a circle of patterned paper, painted around the circle, used the 1-2-3-stamps from the main January kit, painted the stamped images and stampled them to the patterned paper. I also added some messy thread. The words say 1. breathe, 2. count, 3. wait and outside the circle I wrote “patience”.

I added some more paint and the finished page looks like this…

My next page turned out really, really busy. I started out with stamping on top of a set of parallel lines of masking fluid. I then added colour using the Inktense Pencils (from the June Project Art kit).

Next, I splattered some mist over the paper, sprayed some water on top and let the mist run. After drying, I rubbed the masking fluid away.

I prepared the page in my journal with some blue paint and stamping.

I wasn’t happy with the way it looked, though… so I took the black Distress Paint out.

To finish my page, I added some more stamping (triangles and circles) and white paint splatters (using acrylic ink). I also glued down some torn pieces from the book page I showed you above and I added some messy thread. I wrote my journaling on one of the tags from the main kit.

Further ideas:

* I’ve tried the masking fluid on book pages and on watercolour paper – I also want to try it on patterned paper and on photos.

* I would love to try to use it for a portrait in some way.

* I want to try to make more detailed patterns, using the bamboo skewers.

Finally, I have access to the blog again after a couple of days of technical difficulties. Thank you so much Lisa, for helping me setting my post live yesterday!

I wanted to add another example on how to use the patterned pieces created using the masking medium and paint. For this piece I drew some lines and added some splatters of the masking medium. Again, I used watercolours to paint my page.

After rubbing the masking medium away, I cut the paper into squares and I used my sewing machine to stitch them together.

I painted a page in my journal using black gesso and then splattered some yellow acrylic ink on top. Before the ink was dry I added some silver glitter embossing powder. I then added my stitched squares to the page and wrote the names of everyone in my family in little hearts. I used yellow watercolour for the ampersand.

I also tried using acrylic paint with the masking medium and it works perfectly if you apply a thin wash of paint. When the paint gets too thick, I had some problem though, as the page was torn when I tried rubbing the masking medium away. In this example below I varied how much paint I applied, and it all worked just fine. It wasn’t until the paint got even thicker that I had problems.

In the first example above, I used this stencil to apply the masking medium.

I also used the dots above and created this 3×4 card for my PL-album, using Inktense pencils.

I hope you enjoyed this post and that you’ll continue to explore the many ways to use the masking medium in your journal! Thank you so much for stopping by!