In yesterday’s post I showed you my first week’s pages for Glamour Additions. I had several people ask me about the backgrounds I used to make the title page. Really easy to make and very little cost involved. Let me show you.

This is the first page in my spiral bound book I made using Bristol Illustrated papers from Hahnemühle. The perfect paper for this type of book – I am using my book for the entire ten weeks of Glamour Additions. I wanted the cover to be eye-popping which to me means lots of beautiful, bright color!

Mark and I were at Walmart back before the COVID days began and I found these little bottles of paint that I had never tried before. And if I had realized the company had double layered the labels on this bottle I would have used a different one for my photo. Sorry for the blurry-eyed look. Anyhoo, I was really just playing around, seeing what the colors looked like. I grabbed a palette knife and spread some of the yellow onto my paper. Bright and lovely.

I think I bought five colors to try and I smeared some of the others onto this same piece of paper. And I realized as I went that I didn’t like it at all, but I really just wanted to see what the colors looked like, so I continued. And it looked like ick! at this point.

But I was not to be deterred. Hahahaha! Stubborn as I am! I spread a layer of white over the whole piece and suddenly it wasn’t so icky! Not great but not awful.

On the second piece I was a little more careful and didn’t go crazy with the color. I always like pink and yellow together.

After they dried I wanted to add a little sparkle to them. Splatter or spatters, I’m never sure which to call them. I put a little dollop of that white paint on my craft mat . . .

. . . spritzed on some water . . .

. . . and mixed it together with my fan brush. Then I took that loaded fan brush and . . .

. . . tapped the brush against a finger of my left hand and made splatters onto the papers. And you can really see here why I use a craft mat underneath. All that color wipes away with a paper towel.

This piece looks even better with the splatters. I made a total of four different color pieces. Unfortunately I only took photos of these two.

Dry. I love it!

And the other piece dry. I like it much more than to start with. Hahahaha! Now let’s look at my cover again.

You can see part of those two pieces in the top row – center and right. I really love how this page turned out! The best part is how inexpensive those little Walmart paints were. Just 98 cents a bottle and they will last me for a really long time! Now I wish I had purchased all the colors. A girl can never have too much color!

Bristol Illustrated and other Hahnemühle products with purchase links