New Materials and a Canvas

Hey guys! So I'm back with all you guys once again today, and I've got a couple of things to share with you. I went to Michaels today, and got a whole bunch of stuff, plus started painting my first canvas!! The first part of my blog post today is going to be about the canvas, and the second part is going to be about the stuff I bought today. Okay. So let's just get started here, with the canvas. I did this canvas pretty much the same way that I do the rest of my art; lots of layers, bright colors, and distressed effects.  I've been experimenting with a new technique, and that is sort of shown on this piece, but I still need to perfect it a bit before I tell you what it is. For now, you're just going to have to deal with the look of this piece as to see how it works out. :) Now I'll go through a few of the layers I did on here.

I started out with a layer of lime green paint as the base. I love the way this color looks. Then I took a piece of plastic canvas that I had bought and stenciled a circle through it. I added a little bit of text stamping, and, after letting those layers dry I sprayed some glimmer mist over top of it. I made a wash, then added the two layers of drips. And that's where I ended the layers. I know that more layers will be added in the very near future; I was already prepping some more stencils to use on this before I took the picture. Now let's continue on to the stuff that I bought at Michaels.

This is the first set of stuff. I got quite a bit of stuff, so I had to separate it all into three separate piles to photograph so that you could see all of it. In this stack I have a piece of plastic canvas, 2 Sharpie paint pens (a white and a black), a drawing set, a 36 pan watercolor set, a dollar set of clear stamps, a set of 12 tube watercolors, a set of 12 acrylic paints, and a 16 pack of Cray-Pas. Some of this stuff I've never worked with before in my life, so there will be quite a bit of experimentation that you are going to be seeing on this blog in the very near future. I love, love, LOVE experimenting, especially when I get to play with new supplies. So I'll probably be doing that quite a bit.

This next picture is really quite simple, but I really wanted you to see it. I got a 2 pack of 8"x10" canvas' for $5.99. Plus, they were buy 1, get 1 free, so I pretty much got each one for $1.50, which I consider pretty good for canvas'.

This is the last picture of the stuff that I bought today. This is more the paint materials. I got a big thing of white tempera paint because my white paint was gone. Then, I got six different paints for 59 cents each. I really wanted to get one of each color; a pink, a red, an orange, yellow, green, purple, brown, black, and a gray. I had picked out one of each anyways. But what ended up happening was that I had to put some back because I wanted to have some money left on my gift card. And I did. I have about thirteen dollars left on a fifty dollar gift card. So I got all of that stuff, including one last thing of black glitter glue, which is also shown in the picture above for a grand total of $36.18. I would say that I got a lot for my buck. What do you think?

Well, that's about all that I've got for you guys tonight, and I'll see you tomorrow! Bye!!

21 Secrets and an All Paper Collage

Hey guys! I'm back with you guys, and am sharing with you a couple of things. Two pages in my art journal and an all paper on cardstock collage. But more on that collage thing later. Let's get things started here with a couple of art journal pages that I've worked on. These two pages here are from two entirely different courses on the 21 Secrets course (which I am still working on BTW, just without the videos), and aren't eve supposed to be a spread. I thought that I would show you in one picture and just talk about them as separate pieces though, and I thought that it would be quicker and take up less picture space if I did them separately. Okay. So let's start with the one on the left. This is from the daisyyellow course on the thing and she called this a Layer Cake. I really enjoyed making it, and it turned out very grungy and spontaneous, which just happens to be the way that I tend to work anyways in real life. I thought it very cool, and I loved that it seemed to just be a good technique/idea to add to my repertoire. It isn't quite finished yet; I still have to add the title and journaling and stuff, but I still like it a lot.

The second page there is actually another page that I did for the Fearless Art Journaling course. I love her techniques, and the way that it looks it just amazing any way that you end up looking at it. She talks about being very spontaneous with your work, and especially just going with your gut feeling instead of stopping every second or two to think over what you just put down on the page. This two is very much the way that I work, and I really enjoyed working on this page. By the way, I do know that the actual saying is "Less is More", NOT "More is Less." But I thought that it sort of worked vice versa as well, and went along with the same train of thought. I just thought that it might be an interesting thing to work with to see how it turned out.

And here I am showing you an ALL-PAPER collage that I did. As you've probably seen so far on my blog, I am very fond of paint in my collages, so the mere THOUGHT of doing a collage with nothing but paper was kind of stressful to me. But the thing is, you can sort of use the same guidelines as you do with paint. You can be spontaneous and quick, and try not to worry about what you are doing. I've done two so far; the one above is my second that I started yesterday, gluing down a couple of pieces, and finished up today. I did most of it today, so that's the date that is on the back. I found it very fun and a sort of interesting mix up from what I've done in the past. If you tend to use a lot of paint in your work, and find yourself stuck in a sort of rut, where you feel like you're doing the same thing on every page, I highly recommend this. But that's all I've got for you guys today, and I'll see you tomorrow!!

Oil Pastel Technique

Yes. Yes I do. I just thought that I would share that interesting little tidbit of information with you. I don't know if it would help you guys at all, but these were some of the pens that I got for Christmas in my stocking, and I love them. I've had the blue ones in the past, but the red ones are pretty darn epic, if I do say so myself.

Okay, so let's get to the real "bulk" of today's post. I don't have another tutorial for you guys today, I just have a couple of pages and stuff that I really wanted to share with you guys. The one above is the page on the left hand side. That's the one that I really wanted to focus on. Basically I took a background that I didn't really like, or was just really bland, and I took my Portfolio water soluble oil pastels, and colored the rust, and the light blue all over the entire page. Then I pretty much just blended them together with my fingers. I love the way that the whole page turned out, as it looks really nice looking, as well as looking blended and a bit more messy and grungy, which is totally my style.

I used the same type of technique on this index card, and I actually did this one first as a sort of introduction/sample for this technique. Then I was experimenting with my calligraphy pen on another page, and I saw this; I wanted to know if I could use it on top of oil pastels that weren't wet. As it turns out, it comes out with a very interesting technique. Some of it is black from the ink, and other areas are white, from where the tip of the pen scratched away the pastel. But that's all that I've got for you guys today, and I'll see you tomorrow!

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!

Art Journal Pages/Spread?

Hey guys! I'm back with you guys for the second time in a row, and I'm glad that I'm actually getting around to devoting some time each day to blogging. I think that the whole "new year, new slate" deal has sort of helped me out a lot over the time. So today I was just working on some backgrounds and such, just trying to experiment with some different things on the page. These two pages are right next to each other in the journal, but I don't know if this is going to turn into a spread or not. Sometimes when I start two entirely different pages, they somehow evolve into a spread, even if I didn't initially mean for them to be like that. For some reason, that's what this page is saying to me. Doesn't it sort of look like it might turn into that? Oh well.

So basically what I was doing was some experimentation with Portfolio oil pastels and some paint scraping. On the left side, I wanted to it look like the blue in the corners and the red in the middle were mixing at the overlaps to make purple. It did end up looking somewhat like that, but instead of the two colors mixing like I wanted them to, I had to put some purple crayon where the colors met. Eh. It still works. And I do like it. On the other page, I'm not exactly sure what I did. I think I did some color scraping with a credit card as the base layer, and then added some circles/dots with the oil pastels. After that, I mixed some Mod Podge with water, and spread it over the page. While that was still wet, I added some watercolors into it. Yeah.

I would have had something a bit more awesome for you guys today, but I wasn't close to finishing ANY pages today. I started a bunch of backgrounds, but didn't complete any. Plus, I've been busy stalking the internal workings of the interwebs to find some ideas of what I want to buy at Michaels. For my birthday (Which is today! Yay!! I'm 15!!), I got a $50 gift card. But I don't really know what I want to get. If you have any ideas, leave them in the comments, and if they're not too expensive, I might consider it. I was hoping to go tonight, but I'm still not sure. Crossing my fingers over this way. :) I'll post my finds when I get them. And yeah. That's pretty much all I've got for you guys today. I wish you all the best of luck with your artistic endeavors, and wish you a good night. :D