The glorious influence of summer

Hello all!  I'm here with a final inspiration journal page for the Summer Countryside theme I'm hosting at Art Journal Journey this month.  I was so honoured to be invited to host, and it's been such a joy seeing all the amazing pages you've been sharing.  For my final page, I've kept things simple with a soft framing of a watercolour doodle I painted at the start of the month.

I'd been planning to join in daily with World Watercolour Month.  Sadly there's still too much going on, so didn't manage to stick with it, but I was fairly happy with the seven or eight days I did manage (I'll try to get round to sharing them soon) especially given I hadn't picked up my watercolour paints since the Inktober last year.

It took some time for me to get back into the swing of the watercolours, so these trees - from day one - are really pretty simple doodles.

Simple or not, the painting does have that deep summer look about it to me... when the bright fresh greens of May have matured, the glorious flowering of June is over and the countryside settles into the deep lush greens of late July.

I used some of the watercolour ground again to give the background some texture, but otherwise I wanted to let the painting take centre stage.

So I simply stamped one of the quotes from my PaperArtsy EAB22 Summer Edition quote collection on a separate piece of card and snipped it into sections.

The words are stamped in Ground Espresso Archival (I really hope we'll get some more Distress colours in Archival)...

... and layered over some torn strips of Idea-ology Design Tape.  I think this quote is a pretty good match to this landscape of summer trees.

So that's that for this month of Summer Countryside pages for Art Journal Journey.  You've got one more day to come and join in if you're inspired.  I didn't get quite as many done as I'd hoped, but it's been lovely to dip my toes in here on the blog again, and to catch up with some of you again and your lovely entries to the theme.

Thank you so much to the amazing team at Art Journal Journey for inviting me to guest host for July and thanks to all of you for stopping by today.  I'll be back before you know it with a more three-dimensional finish to the month!  Happy crafting all.

Deep summer is when laziness finds respectability.
Sam Keen

I'd like to share this at the Simon Says Stamp Monday Challenge where they would like us to go Wild with Washi... well, I've not really gone wild, but the washi plays a significant role in making the words pop here