This month’s art journaling session was on the theme of ‘industrial grunge’. I thought it would be a great chance to revisit rust effects, drips and runs and also use up some of the matte black vinyl I seem to have inadvertently collected over the years… I also exercised AI skills using Microsoft Designer to create the graffiti and worked with ChatGPT to develop the colour scheme, selecting the base colours with my Nix Mini 3 digital colourimeter. Here’s what I came up with:
I’m still beavering away in the studio making items to sell at the church Christmas Fayre. Yesterday I used what I had learnt at Andy Skinner’s workshop I attended last weekend to create a faux rusted enamel frame and stand for this MDF chalkboard. As it happens, I actually prefer the back – some of the paint had seeped under and the ‘chips’ appear much more organic against the gesso undercoat:
The background for this art journal page was a little bit of a happy accident. I’d covered the page with swipes of dark acrylic paints with a hint of picked raspberry, and feeling it was too dark, I then used what was left on a blending tool I’d been used to apply Dylusions Squeezed Orange Paint to lighten it, and a superb rusty effect came into being. I embellished it with some Vintage Photo Distress Embossing Powder for the grid work, stamped a couple of times with the blueprint in archival inks and then added the text using a combination of archival inks on stamps, freehand drawing and painting, and my trusty pigment pens. As normal, took me as long to find the sentiment, but I love this quote – really does explain the rationale behind my art journaling!