The last Art Journal Session of the year is on Monday, 4th December at The Studio in Leicester. Inspired by all things sparkly and shiny around this time of the year, I’ve come up with this shiny Christmas double-spread:
If you’d like to come to the session, please let me know. I remembered to take step-by-step photos this time, so instructions follow…
Continue readingOver the last ten days or so, I’ve been playing with cast plaster panels. I used all the techniques I learnt at college to mould, soap, build clay dams, pour and pull a plaster of paris piece. Unfortunately, despite all that work, I completely forgot about overhangs. I ruined both the plaster mould and the panel as I attempted to separate the two with a screwdriver.
Undaunted, though slightly miffed, I went back to the drawing board and tried again. This time I pressed items into a clay slab and took a direct cast from that.
This week’s class on Wanderlust (a year long course encouraging art journalers), we’ve been shown how one artist, Kate Crane, creates her own journal to fill in as she travels. Here’s my take on the project. Using two sheets of 12×16″ watercolour paper, I created the concertina pages, incorporating pockets into the overlaps. I’ve chosen to create faux leather straps to hold it together, rather than ribbon, and have made these from Grungeboard. Lots of layered DecoArt Media paints and interference paints over some embossing paste create the cover decoration, and the pages are covered in Distress Paints, DecoArt Media Titan Buff and Quinacridone Gold fluid acrylics and gesso applied through a couple of stencils. Now it’s ready for filling with travel goodness 🙂
I wasn’t at all happy with my finished page yesterday… so I tried again today using what I had learnt from my experimentation. Keeping with the ‘3+1’ theme, I switched the same complementary colours. I am so much happier with the outcome – a cleaner, fresher, more impactful page.