All posts tagged: Art Journaling

Art Journaling. My style

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This title might make me sound all sure of my art journaling self and my style within that.  I am not, but I am getting there slowly but hopefully surely.  I see many artists who have such a distinct style that I can tell their work from 50 feet.  It is not always the same medium or colour or subject, not by a long way, they just have a style which makes them, well, them. I want this, and I hope that in time I will achieve the same. The thing is, I am not sure I am much of an art ‘journaler’ and sometimes I feel like a fraud. My pages can end up tortured looking because I have tried to do all the things all at once! Adding all the layers, then the magazine cuttings (I really don’t like to use magazine cuttings, there I said it), then the journaling. What in the world am I to write about?  I am not spilling my inner thoughts all over a journal page, not for …

Get Messy Art Journal. Season of Introspection. Week 2.

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This week’s art journal pages are full of ink blots (I couldn’t stop!), colour, gelli plate prints, textured gesso and a little self reflection. I am getting along well with my altered book, I am finding it a good size and the pages hold up to lots of media without too much objection. Each of these pages pretty much made itself, in that I had no idea what I was going to do with them until I picked up my journal and got cracking. The bottom ‘owl’ page started as a bright inkblot I made over a week ago and didn’t know what to add at the time, so I left it.  Today I added the owl, black gesso ink blots and some gold paint to mute the whole page. The top page by contrast was never going to be an ink blot, I gessoed and added the lady, then a few days later made the black gesso ink blots.  After watching a tutorial from Carla Sonheim, I made the white gesso swirls, then I …

Get Messy Art Journal and sketchbook pages.

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I brought my sketchbooks on holidays and am happy that I did because I have enjoyed doodling some patterns which I am sure I will use in the future. I often plan with all good intentions and end up doing nothing I thought I would. This time I have enjoyed having my sketchbook to stick old pages in and practice my buoy sketches.  For this season of Get Messy we are using a book as a sketchbook/art journal which is something I like to do anyway, so I am happy with that. I did have a false start though. The original book I was going to use had very thin pages and I knew I wouldn’t be sticking any together to work around this so I picked a new book.  This one is the ‘avocado’ book which I picked up from a yard sale here on the Cape. There is a picture of the front cover in my last post.  For the above page I used three different flower stamps and gave them a painted …

Using an old book as a sketchbook.

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There once was a time when I would not have entertained the idea of using a book, old or new to draw in or cut up for pictures or words or just rip a page out of it to make a print on. Well, now I do all of those things quite happily!  I did a class at the beginning of this year by Lisa Congdon on Creative Bug which required some collage which is something I really hadn’t done before, so I didn’t have any papers to chop up. I decided to pop to the library and see if they had any books in the sale section (25 cents each thank you very much) which were colorful and interesting enough to use.  There were some books which would work,  and with some trepidation I cut the pieces I wanted to use out and stuck them down in a collage-y fashion. Then I joined the Get Messy community and I saw some work being done in old books, not cutting them up, using the actual …

‘I Like’ Friday. Get Messy Season of Lists Week 6.

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I thought I was avoiding the prompts this week and then I realized that I had inadvertently incorporated the ‘write the list outside’ prompt very vaguely in the top page.  The prints are made with leaves, gathered from outside. Ta-dah! The list prompts have made for a challenging Get Messy season for me to be honest.  I don’t often incorporate writing in my pages with much success, but I wanted to give it a go. This week I decided to use the prompts not as a list but as a single sentence or idea, is one item classed as a list?  A single item list?  I think not. I do enjoy writing using a Sumi brush (Home is..) but it often takes a few run ups to get it right.  The thing is when you are working over a prepared background and it goes wrong, it is a ‘start again’ situation.  My first go at this page saw me miscalculating the word ‘paintbrushes’ and I ended up squishing it all up by the time I …

Get Messy Season of Lists. Week 4.

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Lists lists lists!  Most of these pages did not turn out at all how I had envisioned.  I had no idea where my crazy eyed skull was going and I really didn’t like the ‘Six Months’ base page until I added the yellow and black. It just goes to show, the best thing about art journaling is where you end up and the fun and mess you can create along the way. If you want to know more about the Get Messy Art Journal community, pop over to their website and see if you want to join the fun! Happy Thursday x  

‘Get Messy’ Season of Lists. Week 3

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The season of list making continues in the Get Messy community.  I am not sure how I am feeling about the lists yet.  I enjoy a list and I may or may not write them to get through each day, but to use them as art journal fodder may be out of my range.  I don’t normally write much in my sketchbooks, I am more art, less journal. I had a go at drawing a face this week in my journal which I am pleased with. I feel like I have given myself permission to have a go at drawing more in my journal pages.  Some will be spectacularly terrible, but I am hoping to keep practicing and improving! Happy ‘Get Messy’ Thursday!

‘I Like’ Friday. My Art Journal – ‘Get Messy’ Season of lists.

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For this week’s ‘I like’ Friday I have been working on some art journal pages using the themes and prompts from the Get Messy Season of Lists. It turned out to be a classic example of nothing going to plan. I was planning to use the same colours in each page and make all five pages work together. First flaw was that I only made three pages (and I really don’t like one of them very much). Once I got my colours out, I did three base pages using the diagonal ‘stripes’ in the corners using different ephemera and still planning to stick to my grey/pink/green/brick red colour scheme.  I ended up using navy instead of red because it was being used on the eye shaped stencil and I really really didn’t want red eyes (not on this spread anyway, maybe on a page which needs creepy red eyes…). As it turned out I didn’t use the colours anywhere else on the pages, so the colour scheme plan went out of the window right behind …

Tangling, Drawing and art journaling.

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I have this ‘pretend’ friend called Jeanette who writes at Craftwhack blog and has written a rather fabulous book called ‘Tangle Art and Drawing Games for Kids‘ which I got to play with and now I am going to tell you about!   I have met lots of ‘pretend’ friends – you know the ones you meet on the inter webs but not yet in real life (no, I don’t say IRL, I am not a young person).  They are all talented and amazing and when they write a book, I want to see it! This book was no disappointment, in fact it was an inspiration from page to page.  So many great ideas and not just for kids in my opinion, I saw lots of stuff I wanted to incorporate into my art journal. So I did. The Geometry tree (#1) caught my eye and I could not stop smiling at the tangled hair project (#45), so I thought I would give them a go.  At first I decided to concentrate on the crazy …

Get Messy Art Journal. The Season of Lists.

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I am happy to report I am managing to do some work in my art journal almost every day which is something I have been trying to do since I joined the Get Messy community at the beginning of the year. I rarely start and finish a page in one sitting, mainly because each layer has to dry before I add anything else.  This is another reason that I usually have more than one sketchbook on the go. This first page is one I started over a week ago when I saw the fabulous crane in an old National Geographic magazine.  I added a little gold craft paint to the gesso and glued down my bird.  Then I left it.  For ages. I added the triangle doodles and left it again.  Today I finished the page with one of the list prompts from Get Messy Lists – ‘Mysteries to Explore’.  I jotted down a few mysteries and I am not sure that my bewildered crane has any answers! The top spread started as a watercolor …