Wednesday, November 18, 2015

Traveling Art Journal Walk Through

This year I have been participating in a traveling art journal project. 12 of us made an art journal for the others to create in. Once we do a spread we send the journal on to the next person. It's been a lot of fun! I'm working on a journal spread today, so I decided to share my process. I hope you enjoy it! 

Using several colors of craft acrylic I smeared paint around the pages with my fingers. 


I like these acrylics for art journals because they aren't too heavy, and they're usually transparent, which looks really nice when you do layers of paint. 


Once the base dried, I used a Tim Holtz stencil and black acrylic paint on a round sponge dabber. I dabbed lightly in some places and heavier in others. I had originally only wanted to stencil a few places, but I loved the effect so much that I just ran wild with it and did the whole spread. 


I took some liquitex gesso and toned down the background in several places. I really like how bright the spread is, but I wanted to make sure the next layer was really visible. 


I used Faber Castell Gelatos and smeares them around heavily over the gesso.  I wasn't happy with the way it looked, but reminded myself that there are no mistakes in art! So I just trudged on. 


To try and fix the spread so it was to my liking, I used a stencil and a baby wipe to clean away some of the Gelato color that I wasn't happy with. 


I had some printouts that I wanted to use so I spread them out to decide on where everything should go. Using ModPodhe I glued the printouts down in the journal. 


I traced around each of the pictures that I glued down with a white gel pen. I wasn't happy with how it looked because you couldn't see it very much. To remedy the situation, I went back over everything with white acrylic paint. Using a red metallic gel pen I went over the white paint to make it stand out. 

One of the things I've been doing for the journals is use the phrase "Never underestimate the potential of a blank page". So each spread that I create uses the phrase. 

I hope you've enjoyed this blog entry. I plan on doing more like this in the future! Here's the finished journal spread. 😊 





Friday, November 13, 2015

New Things!

I have decided that I wanted to start using this as an actual blog. Not only will I be documenting my art and jewelry along with processes and techniques, I will be documenting my life with chronic illness(es). 

Please bear with me as writing isn't always my forte, but it's something I enjoy doing! Exciting new things to come soon ❤️