Facts - Daily Art Journal Page

Hey everyone! What goes on? I'm back with you guys again today. I seem to be doing pretty good with my daily posting on the blog, and I've really been enjoying it thus far. 

Today I did yet another page that included some hearts. I'm not sure I'm actually going to make it a legitimate challenge for myself, however, I do like the idea of working with one particular shape for an extended period of time. I love the way I have to keep coming up with more and more ideas after continuous working with a concept. It's very inspiring to me personally, and I hope that it's inspiring to all of you guys as well.

Today I also messed around with quite a few layers; I just had a couple of ideas that I really wanted to work with. Yesterday when I was working on my page, I knew that I wanted to use yellow on today's. I didn't know exactly why, but I just did. I guess I hadn't used a whole lot of it as of late, and I felt like it would be cool. 

Then, earlier today, when I was at school, I had finished all of my homework in class. So I was just sitting there thinking about ideas for this page. I knew that I had a black and white dot tissue paper somewhere in my stash, and I wanted to work with that. Then, I had the idea that yellow might look good with it. However, that was all I knew. I decided to just go from there.

I just started layering. Adding different colors and textures, stencils and crayons. I had a lot of fun playing around. I've really enjoyed the past couple of days, using a ton of layers instead of what I've done in the past, which was significantly less.

Anyways. As one final note, I would like to mention that I will add journaling to this page later on; I already have some ideas of what I want to put in. However, I didn't feel like doing it tonight; it would just be difficult, since it is so late. I hope you guys enjoyed, and I'll talk to you later!

Also linking, yet again, to Try it on Tuesday. It's their fault for making the theme hearts when I can't seem to stop making them. :P

Power: 52 Sparks Page

Hey guys! What's happening?

I'm back with you guys again today, with yet another art journal page. Personally, I've really been enjoying the daily art journal pages I've been doing, and it seems that every time I create something, yet another idea pops up into my brain. I just love it so much.

 Today's page is just a bit different than what I've done in the past. Today's page is composed of a ton of layers. I'm not exactly sure what got me to that point, to be completely honest, but I did what I was feeling. And apparently I had a lot of pent up emotions stuck inside of me. Every time I would add a layer, I would love it just that much more. I started with a layer of collage, then the layers of paint, ink, tape, stenciling, and other things followed soon afterwards. 

The 52 Sparks prompt was this: How do you feel when you are alone?

I didn't exactly know how to answer this question, but I decided to give it my best shot. For now, I decided to just put down power. However, I think I may add some letters later on to make it say "Empowered." I feel like that might be a little bit closer to the truth. However, at the same time, I also will feel very frustrated if I am by myself for too long. I think that might have part to do with my personality, and part to do with the fact that I'm a teenager. Not quite sure.

Anyways. Yes. That's what I have for you guys today. I'm so glad that I'm back into art journaling daily now; it just makes me feel so good. I don't even know how to explain it. One of the things that I love the most about it however, would have to be when I'm working on a page and remember something that I used to use all of the time, but have forgotten about. That's what happened with this page and the flower stencil. I forgot I even had it. Then, when I was working on background, I remembered it. And then I went to seek it out.

Overall, I had a lot of fun working on this page. Make sure you check out Dale Anne Potter's 52 Sparks, and I'll talk at you guys later!

Stenciling Tutorial!!

Hey all! I'm back with you guys again today, and a lot earlier than yesterday, if I do say so myself. :) I'm really excited to share this tutorial with you guys, as I've sort of been keeping you guys in anticipation. I guess I've left you hanging long enough. Let's get started, shall we? We're going to start this tutorial off with a background. For the purposes of this tutorial, as I wanted it to be mainly about stenciling, I did not walk you through the steps of making said background. But this can be anything. Personally I like to look for very simple, linear designs that just look like they could use a little bit of spicing up. I looked through my journal, and this page really called to me. Very simplistic, but I love the colors of it. They're so cool.

The next thing that you're going to do is to try out a couple of different stencils. I flipped through lots of my stencils, and laid them over top of the background so I could sort of get a feel for what the finished stenciling would look like on the page. I looked at two stencils; a sun looking one, and my favorite; the flower. I would have used the flowers, but I really liked the way the suns looked. They sort of worked with the whole color scheme of the page. I know that sounds weird, but shapes CAN relate to the color scheme of the page. If you stencil the wrong thing, then you could EASILY end up "ruining" the page, or, at the very least, ending up with an ugly layer. And I tend to like to avoid those layers if at all possible. Now you're going to choose a color to stencil in. I didn't photograph this part, mostly because I didn't know how to. I thought about using a black, but it ended up it would have looked too harsh. Then I looked at a burgundy color, but that was too bright. I ended up mixing a bit of black with the burgundy to come up with mahogany.

Next you're going to take a paintbrush and paint around the edges of the larger segments of the stencil.

Then you can fill in the rest of the space with the paint.

And then the rest of the large areas.

After that you can simply fill in the rest of the spaces with the paint and peel up the stencil. This is a really grungy method of stenciling, and since that's my style it doesn't really matter to me. If you want, you can be a lot more careful, but the steps are done exactly the same way. I hope that you guys liked today's tutorial, and I'll see you guys later!

Art Journal Spread and TEXTURE!!

Hey guys! Sorry that I'm so late getting to today's post, but trust me, I didn't forget. I was doing homework. Yes. Until 11 at night. I know. The first days back to school after a break are absolutely BRUTAL, and the fact that we're getting ready for our final semester exams doesn't help anything. It's almost like we're cramming for the exams. Yeah. So anyways, I did manage to work on a few pages today, but that was very difficult. I managed to take a short 20 minute break from doing my homework to do some art. I really missed it, even though I only skipped one day. I was really frustrated though, and the page above began to take some sort of a shape. I really like the way that it's coming out, even though there's only three layers down there currently. I'm already coming up with new layers, but I definitely don't want to ruin it. Maybe I should make a photocopy before I add more layers to it... that might work.

But it was really a very simple page. I started out by mixing a very deep, dark green color from just blue and yellow. I just used barely any yellow, and that made a much deeper green. I painted over top of my whole page with said color mix, and, on top of that, I layered a yellow Fresco Tempera Paint. Then, I pressed some papers on top and pulled them off. The paper caught the color and lifted some of it up, thus creating the texture that you see here. Then I pulled out my trusty stencils and stenciled some red hearts all over the page. Yet another example of what you can do with stencils. I promise you guys that tutorial will be coming up, as soon as they stop overloading me with homework at school. But I still love school anyways. Just sometimes the homework can be a little bit overwhelming.

This is the second page that I worked on today. It was a nice page in the first place, but I really didn't have any idea whatsoever of where I wanted to go with it. So I decided to do this. Some masking tape was already on the page. I was thinking about bailing on this page forever, and just put the layer of orange tape on top. But the masking tape was calling out to me. So I pulled it up, and I personally think that it looks really good, probably better than it did in the first place. This type of layout also gives me a good place to put a title and journaling when I actually get to that point in this particular page. :) And although that's all I have for you guys today, I'll be back tomorrow with another post here on The Creative Artist. TTFN. Ta Ta For Now.

Stencil Tutorial Introduction

Hey guys! I've been wanting to start doing some tutorials a little more often around this joint, but I just seem to get so caught up in recording my new creations that I forget that you guys probably want more content than just pictures of my art. :) Unfortunately, I wasn't able to get to that today, and, in fact, I couldn't do any art. I'll probably try to do a little bit later, but I don't know about that. I didn't get to go to the craft store yesterday like I had hoped, and I'm going to have to wait until Saturday I think. It feels like it's going to be taking forever, but I guess that I can wait it out. But basically this is just an introduction to my tutorial that I'm going to do for you guys ASAP. The picture above shows some of my favorite stencils with my absolute favorite on the top. It's a nice, simple flower shape, but it has practically endless possibilities. And what I like about it is that it looks cool without looking too girly. Depending on what colors you use of course. I've used pinks and purples and it does look rather girly. So I use colors to decide the theme of my page.

A good example of this would be if you look at the picture above. This is the cover page of one of my homemade magazine/catalogue journals. I think you may have seen this before, but even if you have, then you can still see a lot in it, I hope. You can see that I used the flower stencil almost right below the layer of magazine clippings. I used this with gesso, but you can also use paints, glitter sprays, spray paints, watercolors, and lots of other mediums! I'll be showing you a few different ways to do this, and we'll hopefully have a lot of fun! So continue checking in here and I'll get it up soon! See you guys tomorrow!

Layering With Leftovers

Hey, hey hey everyone! Jordan Hill is back in the blogosphere, and happy and excited as ever to share MY art with YOU! Okay, I know that intro sounds a little bit corny, but I figured that you needed something to make it up to you from me not being on here for who knows how long. But in addition to perhaps adding a little bit of a chuckle to your day, I'm giving a content full post today. I'm going to show you how to add some layers to some of your pages, and how you can use the leftovers from a specific page to do so. In order to do that, I'm also going to be giving you a couple photos of some current work that I've been working on today, so you'll get some of my current work! Let's get started, shall we?

If you look at the photograph above, you will see one of my most current pages. When I was first doing the base layer of journaling for this page (something that I will focus more directly on in a different post), something called to me. It told me to make a pretty pink and purple page with lots of hearts; using a stencil of course. But, being me, I proceeded to make fake nauseous sounds to myself, thus making myself look like a total fool. As I am not fond of pink. If you know me, then you will know that this is so.  However, as that is where my muse was telling me to go, I proceeded to do so. After probably thirty something layers later, I couldn't stand it any longer. It looked horrible, and I hated it. So I went over it with a translucent yellow poster paint. AND I LOVED IT! I did this layer today, as I made the decision last night, and decided to sleep on it. After that, I added some polka dot stamping with a burnt orange color. Then, to finish off the page, I stamped the title with a bright, contrasting blue with foam stamps. However. As I completed each step of the page, I was left with some remainder paint. The rest of this post is what I did with it.

The first thing I would like to focus on was the layer of translucent yellow. Yes, that was the finishing touch to my previous page, and I love to use it to tie all of the layers together. However, that does not mean that you can't use it in the layers of a page in the very beginning. For example, with the yellow, I flipped to a page in one of my other journals, and found a page that only had a single layer on it thus far. It was a layer of light pink paint over the entire page. I thought the colors worked well together, and I then stenciled on multiple flowers to create a layer and a new beginning to a page.

Now we proceed to the burnt orange polka dot stamping. I used that as the next to last layer in my latest page. However, I'm not sure how many more layers I'm going to have to put on here before it's done. It may be almost done. Or it may be just the beginning. If you were wondering, I did use a stencil for the gear portion of it. A gear stencil that I made myself, mind you. I used a Cricut cartridge by the name of Paper Lace 2. I just cut the stencil at size 10 1/2", because it wouldn't let me do it any bigger. If you were wondering, this page was previously showcased in it's VERY beginning stages here.

 And last, but certainly not least, we have the color that I used to put the title onto my page. I used it as the very beginning of a page. A fresh new start. A new beginning. A beautiful, beautiful beginning. I love the way the color works with my personal style, so I know that I'm going to be able to do a lot with this. But anyways. That's really all I have for you guys today, and I hope that you enjoy it! :) See you later!

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!

An In Progress Page

Hey everybody!! I'm back for yet another blog post! I know I've said it before, but I've really missed this blog. :) This is a page that I worked on a little bit today; I was actually messing around with it on Ustream a bit, but then I got interrupted to go swimming. :) So this page isn't actually finished; actually the strips of book paper in the corner aren't even glued down yet. I'll do a type of step by step run through of this page, since I haven't put that many layers down yet. I started off with a bunch of leftover paint from the previous page that I had scraped down. You can't really see it that well, but it's there never the less. Next I had some dried paint in my pallet, so I wet my paintbrush, and used it like watercolors. It was pretty cool. It made a type of wash. After that had dried, I stamped text with black acrylic paint. After letting it dry a little bit, I scraped any extra lumps with a credit card for texture.

Then I put a thin layer of gesso over the top, before finishing off the corner with a black flower stencil. There are still going to be a few more layers over the top of this, including journaling and a title, but for the most part I guess it's pretty much done. Mostly because I love the way it looks. I might add something to the middle of the flower, I'm not really sure yet. But anyways; I'll see you guys tomorrow; maybe I'll have a longer post for you guys then. :) Talk you you later!