Favourites

You know how you work in your Art Journal and you completely love one page and another one not so much? And how when you open your book to start working in it you first go back to that favourite page?

This was my favourite page:


I gesso'd the page and suddenly I saw these figures in it. All I had to do was trace it. First in red, but that wasn't working for me. So then I used a black marker and traced it again. Much better. I filled in the figures and rest of the page in blue, but that didn't stand out as much, so they went back to white and that worked.


But then last night, after gesso'ing another page, and putting some watercolours down, and some of my DIY mod podge (I use about 2/3 glue and 1/3 water) I started seeing a face... So out came my black marker again, following the lines I could see in the background paint.

I decided to only use white paint on half of the face, leaving some of the background paint showing.


I absolutely love it! My favourite page like everrrr...!

Babywipes

A while ago, I was watching Joyce's Ustream, and she was showing how she glues babywipes to paper so it's easier to use them later.

I use babywipes all the time, to clean my brushes before I stick them in water, to wipe my hands when they get covered in paint, or to wipe off a bit of paint from whatever it is I'm doing. So those get lots of paint on them, and sometimes they end up looking really pretty. But cutting babywipes and sticking them to your Art Journal page is difficult, the fabric tears and does not cut easily.

Annnyyyywayyyy....

Here's what I did with the first batch I glued to paper, then cut then sewed together:

I see what you don't see

The Dutch game of 'I spy with my little eye...' would translate to 'I see, I see what you don't see...' I was thinking about that game today, when the last of our Christmas presents arrived from Amazon, in a big box filled with this:

What do you see? Do you see paper that needs to go straight in the bin, or are you like me and do you see... OhmygoodnessbrownpaperIcanturnintoajournal!!
(I have to be honest here and mention that Tye was the one who opened the box and said 'I take it you want to keep this?' He is very well trained...)

The paper Amazon uses for packaging isn't the thickest of brown paper, but on the plus side it's perforated so it can easily be divided into strips that you can then fold over....

I ended up with 28 sheets that I folded:

I will glue about half an inch into the fold (roughly where I put the bulldog clip) then put holes where I put the glue, stack all the pages up and put a ribbon through it.
I might take two sheets and glue them together to create a slightly more sturdy cover.

Because the paper isn't the thickest in the world I can't put too much on it. I'll do some test sheets on paper that was already ripped and I can't use for the journal, and see just how much paint it will take. I'm thinking of limiting my pallet for this to just black, white, grey and maybe some blue or red.

I've put the sheets in my flower press so the worst of the creases will hopefully flatten, and I'll start on the glue tomorrow. Yayy! Thank you Amazon for this free journal!!

An artful mess

The other day I was watching something on TV where a girl casually mentioned that she makes paintings using a mixture of glue and paint and she paints with chopsticks*.
While I realise that this might be something people have done in school, I had never tried it. So what better place to try out this messy technique than in my Art Journal?

First I mixed my acrylic paint with PVA glue. I added a bit of water to make it a bit more runny, then adding a bit more glue until I got the consistancy I thought would work.

And then it was just a case of getting messy!



These are the first two I did, in my Art Journal:



Because I had too much paint&glue mix left, I also did one on a folder I use to scrape on my left over paint:
('Did you notice that folder before? No? Well, now she put a bird on it!')
and did some quick watercrayon backgrounds on some paper and did two more on them:


Oh how I love making an artful mess in my journal!

*)The documentary was on Channel4 'Amish: the world's squarest teenagers' and the girl is Lizzy Watson, and she takes this technique to a whole other level! It took me a while to find her but here's her website.

Inspired by Leslie

So the last couple of days I've been ill, and those who know me will know that I don't do ill. At least not as in, being-sick-ill. And I was being-sick-ill. And then I was panicking about being-more-sick-ill and it all just got horrible and awful and I haven't eaten for two days and I stayed in bed putting my pillows so I'd be half-sitting just in case... well..

As you can imagine the last couple of days have not been much fun.

So today was the first time I got the laptop out again (I had been on Twitter and Facebook but on my phone which isn't half as much fun but it was a great distraction - thank you my Tweeter/FBer friends!) and I was catching up on some Youtube videos and saw Leslie Herger's 'automatic drawing' videos. (here and here and she's done a bunch more)

Even though I'm still not 100% there yet and my tumtum is still playing up a bit, I got one of my sketchpads out and some cheapy markers and did this one:
(the colours are nowhere near as bright in real life but it's the best I can do at the moment)

It felt good to be drawing again, rather than slipping into another 'will I be able to reach the sick bucket in time'-panic (I am an emetophobic, so even though I'm joking about it here it really does set off a bad panic attack, just as panic attacks can set off the fear of having to be sick...) I calmed down and focused on just filling in the colours.

I'll be sticking this in my Art Journal as a reminder of how art can prevent me from going overboard in my head. Just breathe and fill in the colours...

Edit:
This is the page I ended up doing:

Urban Sketching from home

The last couple of days I have been drooling over other people's amazing drawings.

I love Liz Steel's travel journals. I love how she draws all her food and drink. It may not be picture perfect, but you can tell what it is with a few simple lines and her use of colour. Amazing stuff.

Her blog lead me to Urban Sketchers, a site run by a group of people who enjoy, as their name suggests, sketching out in urban areas. They go to busy market squares and draw all that's going on there, or find a run down building and draw that. There's a huge list on that site of urban sketchers from all over the world, who are all taking their sketching outside the comfort of their own home.

I've never done any sketches of buildings. I took Art until the 2nd year of high school and we were not allowed out just yet. People who took Art beyond that got to go on cool trips to Bruges and Ghent and draw all day long. (I grew up not all that far from the Belgian border, so those were daytrips. Still annoyed me when my friends got to go on a trip all day long and I was stuck back in school...)

But hey, I've got pictures, right? Lots of them, on my Flickr account. So why not use those?

This is a picture of Fata Morgana, a ride in Dutch fairytale themepark Efteling where I used to work:

and this is the drawing I did last night:



And this is a picture I took of St. Paul's:

and my drawing:



Now I know there's a lot of things wrong with these. I know nothing about perspective, the colours are wrong, the scale is wrong, St. Paul's looks like it's on the wonk far worse than Big Ben is, but I'm doing it.

I've stuck these drawings in my Art Journal because I want to see where I started from. If I keep this up, using pictures already there on my Flickr, I will hopefully get better and better each time. I'll learn how to use lines and what colours to use and if I draw one window this way, the other one should be at least the same size and not a billion times bigger.

And who knows, maybe one day I will be ready to do some proper Urban Sketching. Outside, out in the open where people can watch me...... iiiieeeee....

Introducing Art Journal 10

on Youtube this time.

Now, it was getting a bit too dark inside to film, and I figured I could go outside and film in the garden.. forgetting that there was this canine wanting attention...

See for yourself:

I'm journaling my life

At the end of my previous Art Journal, I was thinking about 'my style'. What do I like to do in my journals, what kind of pages draw me in when looking at other people's work, that sort of thing.

I had done some pretty pages like this:
which I really enjoyed doing because I adore working in watercolours and pen/ink.
But I also love getting more messy with acrylics and then adding oil pastels and more paint and maybe some gesso and creating pages like this:


I love the texture that creates:



But Art Journaling is about more than getting messy. It's about documenting your life, working through stuff you need to 'think about on paper', (I now write a lot in my Art Journals too and I've added paper especially in my new journal so I can keep that up) even if that means the pages will not come out as pretty as you might like.

I have to admit, when I first saw Connie's recent pages I was worried something horrible had happened to her. But then I looked closer and saw the beauty in what aren't necessarily considered pretty pages. I love them because they are raw. They mean something. They are real and rough, not polished to look all nicey-nice. Working through stuff on paper.

Now I don't claim to have much going on in my life that I've got to be angry or scared about, no deep pain hidden away needing to make its way out. But it's a great feeling to let go of the idea that your pages have to at least be nice to look at if you don't want them to.

Here is what I did the other night, on those gesso-disaster-gone-good backgrounds, in calligraphy markers I had forgotten about (Cult of Stuff anyone?)but loved using and now put somewhere where I can grab them a bit easier for further use:



So does that mean I'll never stick in any more watercolour work? Of course not! I can be a bit schizophrenic when it comes to my Art Journal because hey, it's MY Art Journal, right? If one day I feel like watercolour and ink and being more neat and tidy and the next day I create a huge mess with acrylics and crayons and oil pastels and more acrylics and the day after I only write a few bits in my journal and the day after that I stick in a picture with some DIY tape and a shopping list and a doodle I did when talking on the phone, that's just fine.

I'm journaling my life.

(The 2nd half flip-through video of Art Journal 9 can be found here.)

Oh no gesso - sticky pages

So there I was, gesso'ing away in my new Art Journal, letting the pages air dry before putting some greaseproof paper between them to move to the next spread. I managed a few pages like this a day, so I had my first section in my book ready to go, feeling all proud of myself.

Until......

I opened the book the next day and found most of my pre-gesso'd pages sticking together. WT..?? They had been dry before I took the greaseproof paper out, why were they sticking? And, more importantly: how to fix this?

And then Tye said 'But you like that distressed look, don't you?' He's right! I do!
So instead of 'fixing it', I figured out a way to keep it but make it workable.

I inked up the pages, and used a water/white glue mix (thanks to Rhomany's link on her Whimsical Workspace workshop for 'DIY Mod Podge'! But I used more glue than water so it would not be as liquid as it says on that blog.) to seal it.

Now the pages don't stick together, I don't have bits coming off anymore and I love the look! I might not be able to write or paint on it because the surface is so smooth now (and I don't want to add more gesso and end up right where I started) but I'll probably end up sticking stuff on there anyway so it's not a problem.

Meet Art Journal number 10!

I'm just about ready to start a new Art Journal. Number 9 took me a year (!!!) to finish, but then this is the year where I started to do more drawing and watercolouring, so I've been doing lots of art, just not as much in my journal.

So I was on the hunt for a new journal. I still had one that I had bound myself, but seeing as I had just used a similar one for my 'Week in the Life' book (still need to upload those pictures to Flickr..), I didn't feel like using that one. I'm already using a Moleskine for pen and watercolour work, so I don't want to use another one for my Art Journal...

And then I saw Paula aka Journal Artista's blogpost about her magazine journal. How cool! With that idea fresh in mind, I went to the magazine aisle and spotted one I liked, and when I got home, I realised it was the same magazine Paula is using: a Glamour. Not too big, not too small, with enough pages to keep me busy.

Paula in her post said that (Re-)Joyce, who uses a magazine for her daily journal too. Joyce puts lined paper in her journal as well, Paula told us. So of course I had to go and check out Joyce's Ustream to see how she did that. I have been using Number 9 for journaling a lot, so I think that's a great idea!

So the last two evenings I've been sitting here gluing pages together. Three or four, depending on if the next page was one I wanted to keep or not. I'd put a weight on it overnight so it would dry nice and flat (well, ish, because it's still thin magazine paper glued together..) and loving the result.

Last night, I was looking for some sturdy paper to stick to the covers to make them more durable when I decided on using the white duct tape I was going to use for just the spine. It took three layers before you could not longer see the original cover shining through, but that only makes the covers more sturdy so I don't mind.

So here you go, Art Journal number 10, who I'm sure will be as much an 'everything goes' journal as number 9 is:






Can't wait to start working in it! Thanks Paula and Joyce for the inspiration!

Arting at the desk

Last night I had this burst of creativity that kept me arting at my desk for hours.

First I did some more face and then coloured them in with my Cotman studio set:

Now I could say that the bleeding of the black liner was intentional, but unfortunately I had not checked to see if it would bleed. Doesn't matter though, I rather like the effect:




Earlier that day I Leslie had reminded me of the original blogpost about making your own washi-tape, using watercolours and doodling on them. It's so easy, and so much fun. I ended up with lots of new designs in pale colours that will work so well in my art journal.

And then I tried out making my own DIY old school Polaroid pictures, after Crafty Moira's tutorial. I love the look with the tape, although maybe I need to trim my cardstock a little bit: