 to another episode of Journaling with Movement. In this episode, I really wanted to create something unique that displayed a diagonal movement, which I know we've done before, but a broken diagonal movement. And I really had, I think, some interesting ideas on how to do that. So the first thing I did was I took some rubber stamps that I had. These are of my own design from my Design Line stamp set number 15, but you can use any stamps that you have in your stash and print them out on plain white card stock. Here are the stamps right now called Hand and Heart. And print them out on plain white card stock and then trim them. I had these rings on painted paper from, I think they were from my friend Barbara Clark. I know the paper and I think it was already cut into rings, came in Happy Mail, but I don't remember from who. Anyway, I already have this page with some drywall tape glued on it and a little bit of stenciling. This was, I'm sorry, washi tape. This was a page that, like many of my page, that started with just random scraps landing on it and then I later decided, ooh, I know what I'm going to do. So I know I want to create a chain out of these rings that I was given and have hands on either end for my stamp set pulling on it. I have two colors of paint here, one from Dina Wakeley and the other one from DecoArt, if I'm not mistaken. And I'm going to use them to create some more movement and you will, if you will, or pattern in the background of the page. So I have one of my little tiny small palettes out and I'm putting little drops of paint on the palette. I've sort of dry fitted the one hand on the page and I like where that's going. This is a piece of cardboard packaging and literally I am just painting the paint on the packaging and pressing it into the page. It leaves this interesting sort of ladder-like impression when you use it as something to stamp with, which I like. And so the ultimate message behind this page to me evokes building and growing and I thought the ladder-like design of this piece of scrap cardboard really lent itself to that message. So we're just printing it on. I usually do things in odd numbers. I think it's more interesting, so five times. Then the next thing I have is I'm mixing a brown and a white. This is a hockey puck and I'm using it to create some dots on the page and the dots are very white. So it's not leaving a dark enough impression for me, although I do like the impression it leaves. That one is a little bit better. I do go over some of them with a small brush and the dark paint just to make it stand out a bit more. I love that hockey puck though. It's a great thing just for putting a circle of dots on your page. But in this case, the dots weren't, some of them weren't quite dark enough, so I'm taking some of the paint and a small brush and just touching up a few of them a little bit. I'm not trying to be neat and perfect. This is the background. It doesn't have to be. I thought the dots and the circular shape of the dots, again, are reminiscent of the main focal point of the page, which is going to be the chain. So now we need to let that dry before we can move on. I'm going to cut the two smaller rings in half so that they can be fitted one inside the other easily. And we will get everything together, get this dried, and then we can glue it on and keep going. So now we're going to use a gel medium to, this is by DecoArt, Super Heavy Gel Matte. And I'm going to glue the large hand and the large ring down first. I've already glued the ring to the hand and I'm going to glue that down. And then at the bottom, I have another hand from that set that I stamped out. I'm just pushing it down into the gel medium with a scraper tool. So I'm figuring out where I want the rings. I want it to appear like two hands are pulling the chain apart. And it takes me a few minutes. I should say a couple seconds to figure out exactly what I want to do. And then I realize, okay, I have this other hand. Yeah, and I want to use that. Like that one's just tugging and pulling. So then once I figure that out, I get some more gel medium on the page. And I position that hand so it looks like it's grabbing the ring. And then I take the other ring and put it nest them inside each other. So they look like a chain. Then I get some more gel medium and get that in there and glue it down. And as I'm gluing it down, I open up that one ring so that it appears like it's broken. There you go. You can see me doing that now. Now this gel medium does take a while to dry when you use a medium like this on your pages for any reason, especially if it's glue. It works really well to glue down these thick heavy papers like the card stock, but it does take a while to dry. Before you do anything else like right on your page or do anything else, you do need to let it dry completely. You will mess up your pens if you don't. Just guess how I know that. Make sure everything's stuck down really well. Use an old gift card, a palette knife or a scraper tool to just make sure all your edges are down and that everything's got gel medium underneath it and it's going to dry really well. I do have plastic sheets in between the pages to protect it so I don't glue my whole book together, FYI. So now that everything's dry and you can see that I've trimmed the edges of the pages and the hand was sticking off over the page, I'm grabbing some of my Arteza fine line markers to do a little bit of doodling and add some interest to the page. And again, continue with the suggestion of circular shapes and chains. I'm trying to find a color that I like for the background and then I decide I need to zoom in so you guys can like, I don't know, see what I'm doing. So I am just adding some scribbly circles around the painted dots from the hockey puck with a light tan color. It's probably intended to be a flesh-colored marker but that's not what I'm using it for. Again, before you do this, please make sure that your page is completely dry and then I am going to come in with another color and do the same thing in the same place, not necessarily covering up the first marker but just to add more interest to darker color. And you can see that you have the round circular shapes from the chain, you've got the round circular dots, you've got the round circular dots in a formation because of the hockey puck, you're just repeating yourself but the main focal image is a broken diagonal line. So I want to do some doodling and I am looking for a marker that will do some scribbly journaling for me inside the chain and so I'm using this dark brown color. Nobody has to ever read it. It's cathartic, this is a cathartic process at least for me and just write about what it means to you. I'm adding a few more interesting little marks around the chain to bring attention to the broken chain and the hands. There we go. So now to add our final touch to the page which is our title for the page, I'm using office supply store lettering stencils to trace our title on the page with a ballpoint pen, a bic crystal pen. These stencils come in a set of four. I am using the largest one in the set and I am just eyeballing the letters. This is a nice way to get a nice clean, neat title on your page or word or whatever on your page. My journaling tends to be about words and feelings and journaling so I almost never do a page without a word on it, at least one word on it. So for me, these are fabulous stencils and they're not expensive at all. If you don't have an office supply store near you, you can get them on Amazon. I'll try to remember to put a link in the description below if I forget, somebody remind me. I'm outlining each letter and spelling out break the chain with the lettering stencils with the ballpoint pen. It takes a couple minutes and then I'll go in and fill it with a black pen. I use, as you notice, the largest stencil for break and the smaller one for, I think, the chain or for the and then go back to the bigger one for chain. I forgot that I did that until I'm watching this video and doing the voiceover. I use a variety of black pens to do this kind of work and also coloring in the letters. I find the big crystal pen is convenient. It writes over almost everything. It doesn't clog up often. Filling the letters in, you sometimes have better luck and get a nice darker color. There's a big crystal pen, but that's a broad nib, a broad tip and that's a really good one, but you could also use a black gel pen and honestly, I don't remember which pen I used. That was a little wet right there. I found a wet spot, so Nana was having trouble and it's the very last letter. So then I'm having trouble getting it to write or at least give me the suggestion of a shape. Figures that would be like the very last spot. I finally use a pencil. I'm grabbing just like everything that I can. I'm working in a moleskin 2017 daily diary journal thing. It's an expired one. The paper is on the thin side, so you don't want to get it too wet. You also don't want to rub too hard or scrub too hard. You will go right through to the back side. I finally decide that's enough marks. I can figure it out from there and I can get it from there. Yeah, and if I'm not mistaken, I use a paint pen because I decided that one spot is really wet and so the paint pen will probably do really well there, which it does. So fill all the letters in and use something nice and dark and black. I do finally decide that I don't care that it's going to show through to the back side. But I take a few minutes and I color all of the lettering in and then we have our completed page and boy isn't it good looking. I love the message. I love the composition. I love the way it turned out, but most of all I love the movement in the page and the message in the page. So broken diagonal movement and it has a really strong message. I love that. So think about what you can use in your stash to create some broken diagonal movement to convey a strong message. I know that you all can do this. I have all confidence and if you have any questions, comments or concerns, don't forget to leave them here in the comments on YouTube or you can always message me in my Facebook group a life of art and self expression information for that is in the video description. Above all, go out and have a great day, have a great week, make some interesting journal pages and do something nice for yourself because you deserve it and I'll see you later. Bye guys.