Creative Experiments 1.6

Here I am, back with you guys today with yet another creative experiments post. I love these posts; I guess that I just love being able to find the versatility of a certain supply. As you guys have surely seen before, I've done a bunch of different things with this particular supply. White acrylic paint. That's one of my favorite things to use to tell you the truth. Today I decided to do something with stamping. I already had a page in my art journal that had a dark blue wash on it. I had been making another page and had a dark color of paint. Then, when I was finished working on that page, I still had some paint leftover. So I wet down my pages, and then just painted over the top of it. Then I let it dry. That was a few days ago. Now today, I decided that I wanted to do this Creative Experiments post, and this page was just calling to me.

Basically, I just poured some white acrylic paint onto my pallet, painted it onto the bottom of a paint bottle, and stamped random circles all over the spread. I really love the way that it is looking, even though I don't really know what I'm going to do after this. Sometimes when I'm working on art journal pages, I don't really know exactly what I'm going to do, because I really like the way a page looks after just a few layers. So sometimes I'll force myself to add more layers, and other times, I'll just slap a title on and be done with it. That's sort of what I was thinking I was going to do with this page. I'm still not so sure, but we'll see. We will see.

Creative Experiments 1.5

Hey guys! I'm back, once again, and this time I'm here with a series that I decided to bring back. I had it going a little while ago, but I'm planning on doing a more planned version of the blog now for you guys! I think you might be able to follow it a little better, and I think that I'll have a lot more fun working on it! So where I just left off with this series, I was playing around with white acrylic paint. I was messing around, and trying to use it in as many ways as I could possibly think of. Sadly, I lost my previous list of ideas for the white acrylic paint, but I made a new one, and I was playing around with one of my new ones. I had the idea that if I mixed tube watercolor with the white acrylic paint that it might come up with an effect that's sort of like gouache. Even though it kind of worked, it wasn't the best reaction in the world.

The page on the right (the green) is actual gouache. The way you use gouache is pretty much like watercolor, although it's very much more opaque. I love it. The yellow on the left side is the watercolor and the white paint. As you can see, it's pretty transparent. But not nearly as transparent as watercolor. So it's pretty cool; I came up with a kind of paint that's kind of in the middle in the transparency state of mind. 

And here we have that canvas that I showed you guys a little while ago. I added a few more layers of paint, doodling, sprays and such, and I really like the way it's turning out. I think I still might do a little bit more with it, but I'm still not quite sure. But that's all I've got for you guys today, and I'll see you tomorrow!

Creative Experiments 1.4

Hello my friends!! I'm back again for the second day in a row. It feels really good to be creating and sharing my art with all my internet friends after so long. Today I'm going to be doing another Creative Experiments post, which just happened to be my favorite back when I stopped. I think that I just love the idea of experimenting with a supply until I exhaust it. Then, when I've done one thing I just switch to another. I'm going to be experimenting with another white paint project today. I've used it before in this ongoing project probably about three times. Today I'm going to be using a wash of white paint. I thought that it wouldn't work, but it actually worked a lot better than I thought it would have. The piece above is something that I didn't quite hate, but I didn't really like it either. It started to bug me just sitting in my journal, so I thought I might as well try this, and if it didn't work, then oh well.

Here's the result. I love the way it looked, and the texture was amazing. I didn't really know what to do, so I did a bunch of stamping, and then I tried this technique with masking tape. Sadly, it kind of ruined the background, and it reminded me of an updated christmas wrapping paper. My mom said it reminded her of a really cluttered basket. I should have taken a picture of that before I continued on, but I hated it so much, I couldn't stand to look at it for another second. Soo... I used a rust colored oil pastel to color the page. I liked it, but then I stamped some circles over the entire page with white paint, and added a few strips of painted masking tape down by the bottom. It's cool. I like it now.

But it took a lot to get it this way. I guess the lesson learned here is that you can never be afraid to cover up good layers, and you can't be afraid of the WAY ugly layers. Oh yeah. And a white acrylic paint wash DOES work.

Creative Experiments #2

Hey all! I'm back again today with yet another post on art journaling. One of the things that I said I'd like to accomplish this month was to continue on the projects I had started last month. Today I'm going to go back to the creative experiments posts. I've been working with white acrylic paint, and so far I've only used it once, in order to lighten a page that was too dark using blending. That worked very well, but here's yet another page that uses another sort of "technique." Basically I just took a book that I've been working on altered book that is actually done using a technique called reverse collage. You paint around the photographs leaving some of them intact.

Normally you use black paint to do this, but in this one I used white. It took several coats to actually get it a good opaque color, but you can actually still see through it.

Here's what it looked like after I put the white paint on it. I basically just used it as a base layer so I could do all of my other layers on top of it. Now some of you might have been wondering why I didn't just use my base color as the layering portion instead of the white, since I normally use acrylics in my work as opposed to other mediums. Well, there are actually several answers to that question, the one of lesser importance being that I was trying to come up with ideas for using white acrylic paint. Of course that's a lame excuse. However, there is a better reason.

That being that I was wanting to use my water soluble pastels, and I've never heard of them working that well on black paper. Though now that I think about it, that may just be something to experiment with. :) So anyways, in the picture above you can see pretty well how I layered the white paint over the pages of the book, leaving the one really cute picture of the cat in the garden intact. And you can probably also see the beginnings of my pastel background; I got a little overzealous and started before I took a picture. Hehe.

And here, is the page when it's finished. I think I used this photo yesterday, but I gave you a sort of warning. Anyways, yeah this is it. I like it a lot, even though it's a little darker than I normally like. I did a lot of layering, including stamping with bubble wrap and a black wash. There's other layers in there, but those are the two that came to mind. And the pastels of course. :)

Actually, speaking of layers, I tend to use a lot of layers in my work. Currently I am working on a page that has TONS of layers in it, including experimenting with using mod podge as a texture item. I don't know if it's going to work yet, and if it does, I don't know if it'll show, since it is clear; but I figured I'd give it a shot. That's the plan anyways. So I hope you enjoyed today's post; I dunno if I'll be able to make it on tomorrow, but be sure to check incase I do!! See you guys later!