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.