Art Journal Collage Papers

Hey guys! I'm here. What's happening? It's been so long since I posted. At least it seems that way. In reality though, it's only been a couple days. Trust me when I say that I'm trying, but it's just getting harder as school goes on and I keep getting more homework. But I seem to keep trying to work in my art journal each day. Sometimes on loose pages, and sometimes in a bound journal. I used to be ADDICTED to doing only a bound journal, and finishing a page before I started another. But, as I've went on, it seems I've gotten better, and am a whole lot less strict when it comes to working on art. Now I use loose pages and bound journals, and I have about 5 or 6 art journals started/planned. As it goes on, it just seems to get crazier!

In the picture above, you can see what I've been working on today. Loose pages. These I normally copy and then use in my work, or just collage onto my pages. I made my own little collection of paper. Four sheets. So far I've done about 12 of these sheets and you've already seen 3 of them. here are four more, and these are like the only ones that actually go together, but I think that as I create more sheets, I'll be able to create more little collections that work together. These are really cool sheets, which I start out with magazine pages, then prep them in different ways. Then I do stamping with found objects on top of it. So far I've done a bunch, and I LOVE working on them. :) That's all I have for you guys today, and I'll talk to you later! Bye!

Collage Art Journal

Hey guys and gals!! I'm back once again with all of you! I love posting here, though I'm sorry that this post is so late coming today! I got home from school, then had to do some homework. But I'm glad that I'm finally getting to this! It's probably going to be a bit of a shorter post today, because I have to do this quick. Either that or I'm just going to focus and just GET IT DONE. :) If you look at the picture above, you can see a page that; though I haven't worked on it for a while; I might think about working on this one soon. I was looking through some of my older journals for something for the blog, and this just naturally drew my eye towards it. I think it's the colors. I really do. Whenever I see lime and blue together, it just feels RIGHT. Those are my two favorite colors, and when they're together it is such a bright and colorful situation. If you have any suggestions for how to continue the layers on this that would be amazing! Comments make me happy. :)

Here's something else I want to show you; I barely ever work with collage, and when I do, it never really turns out that well. This is my absolutely favorite collage page I've done. I don't really know how I did it, though it just turned out perfectly. I love how the images work together, even though they are from completely different places. Some are from magazines, some from catalogues. Some are from the newspaper, and still others were simply printed out in a collage sheet. That's how collage works. You take tons of pieces from completely different locations and create one whole. It's really a cool process. I actually did this in my homemade magazine journal. As you can see from the many different things that I've done in this, the possibilities for this type of journal is endless! Once again, suggestions are always appreciated. Actually, I think I'll start a new paragraph for this.

Suggestions. That's where I left off. I love suggestions, and comments simply make me happy. If you ever have anything that you're looking for; a certain type of journal, or perhaps a tutorial. I think that's something that I need help with. I need to know what you; the people want to see. I know what I want to see in a blog, but that's not always what my readers want. :) So please, please, PLEASE comment with your suggestions. Please. :) I don't want to seem like I'm begging for comments or anything, and you don't even have to compliment my work. :) I just want ideas for the blog. Okay. I'll see you guys later! Bye!!

Art Journal Experiment and an Altered Magazine Page

Hey guys!! I'm back here with all of you once again! I'm glad that I'm actually managing to get on here with school and all. Since that has started, be expecting daily posts (hopefully), unless I decide to bail on that idea. Just be expecting them later on in the day, okay? :) Okay. So you you guys remember that page that I showed you guys yesterday? The yellow one that I couldn't decide how to continue the layers? Well, I found out a good way to figure it out! I have a color copier that is currently sitting in the garage. It's a huge thing, and really clunky. But it's beautiful. In it's own special way. :P I like to use it for art journaling, and this is how I did it. I ended up making color copies of the page I was a bit unsure about and then I just did the choices on different copies. The first time I masked off pinstripes and then painted them black. Something that must be noted is that the color copies came out a LOT more green than the actual piece. In the real piece it's more of a deep yellow than a lime green. But I went with it anyways. It was more the technique that I was going for.

The second thing that I did was stamping with bubble wrap. This is actually one of my favorite things to do on my art journal page, and when I looked at it, I could just see it. But I was still having trouble deciding between the two. Thus the experiment on the copies. :) I really liked the way the bubble wrap looked. The way I got the effect I did was I took a piece of bubble wrap and kind of tore it into a weird shape. That way it didn't look too staged. Anyways, I applied a TON of black poster paint to it (I use poster paint a lot in my work) and stamped one clear(er) image in the upper left hand corner. Then I used the same application of paint to off stamp the rest of the page. I LOVE the effect. :) I decided that this was defiantly the one I wanted to use, and so: here's the result:

I love the way it turned out. It reminds me a lot of my style, or what I think my style should be. Messy, and worry free. Although most of the time these pages come out of my head when I'm stressed. Luckily I don't think that's the case with this one. I love the grungy effect the stamping gives the page, and I love the way it sometimes pulls up paint as well. Also, since this is the original, this is the ACTUAL color of the page. See how it's kind of a dark yellow compared to the limeish color of the copies? I don't really know what I'm going to do from this point, but I'll probably work my way through this page on this blog. Ha. I'll do a layer and then post it along with some other stuff, then another layer. That would be funny. :)

Finally, I have one last thing to share with you. This right here is something that I've been working on for my 21 Secrets class. It's an altered magazine page. You tear pages out of a magazine or catalogue and then just do a bunch of stuff with it. So far I haven't done that much to it; there's actually only two layers on there, but I think it's looking pretty cool thus far. If you look on the left side, you can see where I tore this page out of the magazine; some people may decide to trim this up, and others may not. They may just decide (like me) that they enjoy the raw edge and the playfulness and the non-perfectness that it perceives. That's all I've really got for you today, but I'll see you guys later! Bye!!

Catch Up Art Journal Post

Hey guys!! This is a bit of a catch up post for me right now; just telling you what I've been up to the last couple of days. Sorry that I've been a bit of an irregular poster lately, but at least I have a good excuse. :P You wanna hear it? I started a private school! I've been home schooled all of my life until now; so it's a pretty big change. Today was actually my first day! It was kind of fun. I haven't really done all that much yet; we only had a half day, and there were just a bunch of introductory courses. It was pretty cool though. I hope that I'm still going to have time to keep up with this blog; it really is fun for me, and I've already had more than 60 posts, and we're coming up on the 70 mark pretty quick. :) If you look above at this watercolor picture, you'll see one of my experiments. I was playing with some kid's watercolors, trying to find out some new techniques.

I was actually playing with some Diana Trout techniques; just search her name on YouTube, and you'll probably find her channel. She has a book called Journal Spilling, and even though I've never read it, I've heard that it's pretty good. I've heard that it's mostly for people that enjoy working with watercolors, but I think that a lot of her techniques would be worth working in watered down acrylics. Now that I think about it, that actually would make a cool post. :) Maybe I'll try that out sometime. I worked on gessoed pages this time, even though I didn't very much in the past. I just recently got some gesso, so I've been experimenting with the differences between gessoed and non gessoed pages.

Here's another page that I've sort of been working on recently. I don't really know all that much about the basis around my thought process when I was working on this page, though I do know that there was a layer of journaling. You can sort of see it in the background of the page. It shows kind of a cool effect to it. Kind of a ghostly feeling. Cool huh? Now that I'm looking at it, my mind is already kind of working out ways I could use it. Both ways use black. My first way is to use bubble wrap to stamp black paint all over the background. That could look really cool. The second way that I'm considering is using masking tape to cover some areas, and then put black stripes horizontally over the entire page. Now that I think about it, it might look nice vertically as well.

The last thing I have here is a page in one of my magazine pages that I was working on. I started out with a layer of gesso as the background (you always have to coat magazine pages somehow) and then put down a layer of kids watercolor paint. I added some watercolor crayons over the surface and wet them down. Then I scraped into the background some swirls with the back of my brush. The final layer that I've done SO FAR was a layer of a background script stamp that I put down with gesso. It looks so cool! So that's all I've got for you today, and I'm sure tomorrow will be just as cool.

Art Journal Page and Homemade Stamps

Hey guys! First of all for today I just want to start off by apologizing for not posting yesterday. I was just otherwise distracted, and wasn't really feeling the art mood. So yeah. Sorry. But I'm posting now. :) I'm gonna start off with this page that I just was working on today; the blue strips that are on there are actually strips that I cut from a copy of a previous art journal page and glued onto it. I added white acrylic paint over the tops, and then alternating Portfolio oil pastels to each stripe. I finished it off with a layer of stamping of a foam flower stamp.

Here is one of the pages that I sort of have been making as extra collage material. I've been messing around with laying the book paper down on top of non dried paint, and then pulling it up. It creates excellent texture on both pieces. This one has been used on multiple pages and it almost ready for collage work. Probably what I'll do is make color copies in several sizes and use the photocopies instead of the original. And then maybe eventually I'll use the originals when I'm ready, and have made new ones to use. :) You can sort of see the words from the book paper in the background. These pages are from an old dictionary, but you could use anything. You could even use newspapers or magazine pages.

The last thing I wanted to share with you tonight is this picture of some stamps I've made. I made the eraser ones by carving into cheap, dollar store erasers with an exacto knife to create the designs. The swirly one I made by gluing string onto a piece of cardboard. And the other one I made by gluing a foam shape onto another piece of cardboard. :) That's all I've got for you today, so I guess I'll see you guys later! Bye!

Homemade Journals

Hey guys! So today, my post is probably going to be a little bit shorter that they normally are. Sorry about that, but all that I did today really isn't worth showing. I have come up with a plan. Basically, I have this website (that I've previously linked to on this blog) where I'm selling stuff for all types of art forms. I started out mostly with embellishments, but I'm pretty much ready to expand already. If you don't know what my personality is like, you'll probably find out soon. I'm kind of impatient. I came up with the idea to make tons of different kinds of journals and also sell them on my site. The first one that I managed to come up with is a journal made entirely of magazine/catalogue pages. It's hand bound with 5 signatures of 30 pages each (front and back) So, if you used all the pages, front and back, then you would have 150 pages to work on. That's including the front and back covers.

I'm considering offering these in 2 ways; gessoed and ungessoed. What do you guys think? I also had the idea to do a mixed paper journal, and a plain paper journal. Any other ideas? What do you guys think? See you guys later!

Journal Crazy

Hey everybody!! I don't have as much to show you today, since I didn't work on as much today, but I do have one thing. You know that circles page I did a couple days ago? The one with the big blue stenciled circles? Yeah. Well, I don't know what came over me, but I ended up journaling over it. I don't know. I was just feeling weird, so I did. I actually did the journaling in three directions. Then I painted over it in white. The black ink lifted through the white paint, giving it a cool kind of texture. I really like the way it looks, even though I kind of liked it better before.

Here's a picture of it from a bit of a different angle, where you can see the text just a bit clearer. I know it doesn't look like the coolest thing in the world through the photographs, but it has a lot more texture in real life. I'll see you guys later! Peace.

Stenciling and Experimentation

Hey guys! I'm back here with all of you once again, and this time with yet another journal page that I worked on today. I did quite a bit of journaling today, even though I spent about four hours sorting through all of my stuff and tidying up my space. I spent a lot of time cleaning my stuff and messing around with techniques as I went along. That's normally how I clean. I'll be sorting through a lot of stuff, and all of a sudden I'll come across some random thing that I really like. And then I'll be forced by myself to play with it. I'll mess around with that for about 5 minutes, then get back to cleaning. Above is pretty much the only page I was working on today. Adding on layers. I started with a layer of journaling in Sharpie, which I seem to be doing a lot of lately, and then I put on a thin coat of gesso.

I followed that layer with some Portfolio watercolor crayons; I drew a bunch of swirls over the whole page, and then I wet it down with a brush and spread it over the whole page. I really was liking the way it was turning out, and so I decided to keep a few of swirls only partially saturated. So in some places you can see a bit of a swirl here and there. :) Over top of that I ended up taking some dark blue dye ink and stamping a whole layer of a handmade triangle stamp I made with an exacto knife and a cheap eraser.

Finally, I finished off the page with a bunch of cute little stenciled flowers in white. I made the stencil myself with my cricut. It's pretty small, but I just randomly stenciled them in, not really caring much about where they fell. Underneath the first layer that I described in this post, there were a bunch of other layers too. A base layer of paint, some washi tape, a couple layers of stamp and painting, a layer or two of tissue paper; all below the journaling. :) So you can see how many layers I use in a single page. It's defiantly not just a couple. That's my style. I've been developing my style more and more lately; trying out different techniques by different artists, and incorporating them into my PERSONAL style. As you have probably seen from the last couple of posts, I've been experimenting with stencils in my journal. I love using them and they're so fun! So the only way to learn is to experiment. :) See you guys tomorrow!!

Stenciled Art Journal Page

Hey guys! Guess what? I'm here for the day once again. :) I think the page that I've been working on today is one of my favorites. I know that I've said that pretty much every day for the past few weeks, but it's really true. It's really weird, but the more I art, the more I love the pages I've been working on. In the photo above you can see that I did a darkish blue background and then did a bunch of journaling on it. You can see it's rather rough, and I'm not being careful at all. Some letters are missing in a lot of the words, but for me, the journaling part is simply so I can get all my emotions out on the paper. It also doesn't really matter what it looks like since I normally cover it up later on anyways. After that I blended gesso over top of this layer with a brush.

And here's it after a few more layers. I put some stamping in there with a little bit of patterned paper that I somehow managed to blend into the background with paint. Then for the part that you really see the most of on this page. And that would be the stenciling. I cut out my own full stencil sheet on my cricut. I ended up with a nice stencil and a pretty big stack of circles that I can use in my journal. It's pretty cool. Basically, to do this, I placed my stencil on in a cool arrangement, and then painted all the circles white. I decided that it wasn't good enough, so I did some random circles in a light teal color. I love the way it turned out.

Just one last close up before I go. Here you can see a better example of the stenciling. You can see the texture of the periwinkle colored stamping behind the circles. I know I've said it before; several times in this post even; but I REALLY love the way this turned out. :P But I'll see you guys later! Bye!

Art Journal Background

Hey everyone!! I'm back with all of you once again. This is actually close to one of my favorite pages I've ever made. It's pretty interesting actually. Not as bright as I normally go, but in the same type of color scheme. Basically I just did a REALLY bright page, and then dulled it way down with a really thin coat of gesso. I was hoping it would make it easier to write on, and I'm sort of assuming that it will, considering. The border is probably my very favorite part. I mixed a chocolate brown by taking my regular brown tempera paint, and mixing just a tad bit of black into it. I love the way it turned out. Probably later tonight I'll be adding some journaling page to the base, and then add a bit more gesso. I love journaling before bed lately; it feels like just a different way of keeping a diary or something. Though I prefer the term JOURNAL over diary. Diary sounds too girly to me. Yeah.

Here's a close up of the middle part of the background. Looks pretty cool, huh? I think so. :) Sorry there's not that much of post today. But this was the best I could do. :) One last thing before I go; I worked pretty much all day today on a new website for me to sell mixed media supplies for you guys. Here's a link: http://jellybeansdesign.weebly.com :) I hope to see you guys there!

21 Secrets - 3 Little Words

So I don't know if I've mentioned it here on the blog before, but I ended up getting 21 Secrets! I've had it for a couple weeks now, and I've been working my way through the first lesson. I know, I'm a slow worker, but I've just been having fun with it and experimenting in any and all ways I can think of. :) I know that's a pretty broad range of things to do, but I think it's fun. I love to do it. Experimentation is the best way to learn, right? In this one, I wrote a kind of poem using segments of three words. It turned out pretty nice in my opinion.

Here's a better showing of the poem itself. I used rubber stamps to stamp onto tissue paper, and then applied it to the background with Mod Podge. This page may also not be finished yet, though I'm not sure. I love the way the colors work together too. Here's the whole poem:

Workouts will be

Off the mark.

Peace and Harmony;

It's a start.

I really like the way the poem itself turned out, though I'm not exactly sure what it means. :P See you guys next time!

Link Sharing!

Okay. Today I'm going to try something a little different than I normally do. I'm a normal, almost article writing type blogger. But today I'm going to try something that I've seen a couple other bloggers do, and I always appreciate it. I'm going to post a bunch of links that have caught my eye. A few of them are older, but for the most part they just came out of my Google Reader. They all inspire me, and I hope to inspire some of you! Whenever I see one of these on somebody else's blog I always find it fun to browse other sites that the author found inspiring. So here it goes!

I found this post very inspiring, and I LOVE the story behind it (though I'm sorry she lost her painting.

Here's a nice interview post. I always love these.

I love the quilt featured here, and a stash pic is always welcomed!

This is a post of a really cute quilt; freeform pieced birds!

This one is AMAZING... a bound book made from a coke can!

I've been working on a squidoo lens about inspiration, so this was spot on!

This is on a challenge site; using monochrome on an art journal page!

I love the journals this lady makes. They're so unique.

So I hope you enjoyed today's post, and I'll talk to you guys later! See you!

A Monochromatic Card....

Hey everybody!! Though I'm still playing a bit of catch up, this post may (or may not) be a little bit longer than the last post since I have very strong emotions attached to this page. This is, I think, the second time that I've actually emotionally connected to my pages. I had just gotten into a BIG fight with one of my brothers. It was horrible - a very bad experience, especially on my part.

But you see, in the end we made up and everything was good again. So I made this page as a representation of that. My favorite color is blue and his is red - when I scraped these colors together onto the page, it was a sort of literal representation of our differences being put aside; actually mixing even; into an entirely new color - purple!! I really like how it turned out, and I did a bunch of journaling on it. I'm still trying to think of the perfect title.

Here's another, more full, straight on view. I actually think that the colors are a bit more true in this photograph than the other, though they aren't THAT different. That's something else that I have trouble with; getting my colors true to life. I know it's never possible to get them perfect, but I'd like them to at least RESEMBLE the real colors. :P If anybody has any tips, that'd be cool...

And last but not least, a card for today's 365 Cards challenge. The challenge was to put color on your image in 5 different ways. I got my 5 colors on the first, upside down tear shaped bulb. From top to bottom, they are: gel pen, colored pencil, acrylic paint, markers, and glitter glue. The other bulb was simply colored in with gel pens and markers. I hope you like it, and have a good day!!