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.

Creative Experiments 1.3

Well, I'm back with another creative experiments post. Yeah. I've been having a lot of fun with this series, and I intend to keep it going for a while. It seems like it's such a vast variety of things going for it, that it makes it an almost unstoppable series. So I'm back for the third time with another post about experimentation with white acrylic paint. This time I was trying to use it as a substitution for gesso (making a good base) and also as a texture paste type substance. I started with the page on the left. I just used white acrylic paint and used a brush to stroke it on very heavily. Then I used the handle of the brush to draw swirls in the paint.

I made several notes about this one. Number one being that it dried very quickly, making it very tough to draw enough texture. It just didn't work very well in my opinion. I didn't like it so well. Also, the texture was the same as paint, then the texture drawings sort of merged into each other. There wasn't that much texture after it dried. The second thing I tried was setting the white paint out for a little while (a couple of hours) and THEN painting it on in the same way. It actually had a LONGER drying time, and it kept the texture. This one I was in LOVE with.

After I'd put on the base layer/experimental layer of white acrylic paint, I decided to use red, orange, and yellow water soluble chalk pastels to make a nice background to work off of. It turned out really good. I love the way the color blend so perfectly, and the way you can totally see the texture; especially on the right side. As you can see, the left side didn't really go that well. Even after I added ONE TRANSLUCENT layer the texture started to disappear. It was disappointing, but I really like the way the right side looks. Now I know that you have to leave the white acrylic out for a couple hours. And it works just fine.

Here is a bit of a close up of the right side. You can definitely see the texture in this piece; the swirls are the parts that I scratched into the paint with the end of the paintbrush. You can see it worked just fine.

And here is the finished page. I did a TON of layers on top of it. I like the way it looks, though I may just add a bit more color in yellow or orange in pastel on top of all these layers. You know? It just feels a little dull; not very vibrant. If you look at the title, you can see the words; Feed the Flames. The journaling part says: Summer 2011; A time to experiment, create, and EXPLORE!! This was for the first prompt of a free art journaling course. You can find that here: Art Journaling Course. It's a really cool course!!

One last picture before I leave today; a close up picture of the center of the pages so you can sort of see the comparison. See the difference? I love it, even though it's just an experimental page. I hope you guys liked this post; thanks for looking!!