An Art Journal For my Daughter

I have been working on Christmas gifts and have been making my family members homemade gifts. (Which are near and dear to my heart, I love HOME MADE!!)
At any rate, I really wanted to make my 20 year old daughter an art journal of her very own. She is a very talented young lady, a writer and also loves to draw and make art. She doesn't really have an art journal that is truly personal so I decided to make her one that hopefully she will love. 
I just love the way this came out so I had to share with all of you the final outcome of the front cover. I'm also going to create one page inside specially for her from her Mommy!! HaHa!

The first thing I did for the cover was sand it a bit. and then painted the entire front and spine with gesso in order to prime. 
I wanted to make the cover pop with lots of beautiful color so once the gesso was dry I sprayed the entire cover with different colors of Dyan Reaveley's sprays.  I didn't really think about it before I did that but I had a delima after the sprays were dry. How was I going to seal this cover so the colors would not run. Being that they were Dyan's they are water based and I couldn't use traditional sealers. I ended up using some Krylon glossy spray sealer and started with a very light coat and added two other light coats after the first was dry. Being very careful not to spray too much at a time so that the colors would not run.
Before I sprayed that I used acrylic paints to create layers with stencils and stamps and I also added the letter there. The letter was part of a letter than Brittney has written to me awhile back. It was heartfelt and wonderful so I really wanted to add it into my creation of the cover of this journal. I didn't want the paper to be white so I added some sprays to that as well. You can't really see what it says here but you can read it when your holding the journal in person. Her writing is very tiny. lol...
I added some embelishments and the words "Expect the Unexpected" because Brittney is a poem writer and her poems are very real and unexpected. I also added to Raven at the bottom because her middle name is Raven. I added the symbol to the book mark because her favorite football team is the Saints, she loves them! haha! I also wrote her name on the spine and added a few steancils there. 

The Following Two pictures are a few I took prior to adding the  three acryilic parts to the bottom, I wasn't sure what I was going to do there and decided to add the Raven after. I also changed the charm that was added to the bookmark ribbon as well. I wanted it to be more personal.

I will be posting this journal into the following challenges this week:

Order of the Opus Gluei It Figured Challenge

Sunday Stamper  Something Blue

Thanks for checking me out here! Be Inky everyone!!