The next art journal session in The Studio is on Monday, and this morning I’m prepping my samples. We’re going to attempt to create an illuminated letter. I’ve put together instructions for a basic Celtic arched lettering, but this is my take on a more Gothic Celtic style of illuminated lettering.
I’m having a go at catching up with some of my art journal online challenges and classes I’ve been neglecting for a few weeks (actually probably months). I’ve caught up with the Wanderlust One Collage Challenge, but part of the deal with that is that I can’t show you it until the last stage at the end of the year. But I have been taking pictures of each stage, so it’ll be worth waiting for!
Then I moved onto May’s Pick A Stick Challenge – ten prompts drawn at random and completed in order. I pulled out the very first journal I started way back in 2011 and found a background to work on – oh how my art journaling has developed! Continue reading
Something about this page reminds me of naff pub decor. For the anaglypta effect, I used the embossing paste through the stencil, let it dry, scumble glazed with the tan colour and then sponged the darker colours through the stencil to catch the raised areas. Napkin decoupage and an image transfer of my own typography completes the layout.
Used on this page:
I’ve snuck this creation in between finishing a commissioned art journal, and making the samples for tomorrow’s fabric printing/painting workshop. The Pick A Stick Challenge for the uninitiated is ten techniques or journal prompts pulled at random by one of the four coordinators of the challenge, and you must then create your page using those steps in the order in which they were pulled. This is what I came up with for June’s ten sticks 🙂
I started this page with no real idea of where it was going to end up – scraping the paint on with an old gift card was the start of the background, before I added the retro oblongs using one of the same colours. The rest built up from there using the stamp set as inspiration.
Used on this page:
I love the translucency of a thin coat of gesso – pop that over a pointillistic background and I can almost imagine it’s a frosted glass panel. Reversing the stencil direction and moving it into the spaces of the previous colour developed the pattern over a sprayed page. I sealed the Distress Sprays with the solvent based spray varnish – it doesn’t move the water-reactive inks and stabilises them enough to work over them with waterbased media.
For this layout:
These pages were an exercise in complementary colours. Using the Distress palette, I chose a colour and then the closest colour to its inverse – a different way to find a complementary colour than using a colour wheel. Above, Stormy Sky meets Gathered Twigs, whilst below, Crushed Olive zings against Shaded Lilac and Dusty Concord. Oh yes, one more thing – buckled pages do not make an easy surface to be stamping paint onto…
Part of art journaling is using a journal as an experimental area. Today I tried a method of creating weathered wood using paint layers, distress inks and archival inks, and it sparked off an idea for the layout. Somewhat annoyingly, it took longer to find a suitable saying to match my idea than it did to make the page!
In the first Wanderlust class of the year, we were prompted to use just one word on our pages – and yesterday, I was so tired. Poor sleep, recovering from a cold and a wet grey day all got poured into this art journal spread. Building on the learning gleaned from the first pick a stick challenge, I layered and layered, and am actually rather pleased with the result, as grey and drab as it is!
It’s the first time I’m working in a spiral bound art journal – this one is a Daler-Rowney Cachet Artist’s Mixed Media, A5 sized, 30 page, 250g/m2. The paper is wonderful to work on, didn’t buckle under the wet media or bend with dry acrylic and basically took everything I threw at it. There’s just one issue – the spiral bound spine: those pesky wires. I’m sticking with the book for the Wanderlust classes, but will be looking for stitch bound journals in the future.
I like a challenge… and I like it even more when I get inspiration, have the materials, and more importantly can snatch a moment to get the piece done. So it is with some delight that I share with you my entry to the Ranger Ink ‘Seasonal Color Palette’ Challenge: to create any project using the theme colours based around the Adirondack Color Washes in Butterscotch, Meadow, Espresso and Sailboat Blue. It’s a 12×12 inch canvas:
From concept to final outcome took approximately 3 hours, with only two hours of hands-on crafting. I started by using Adobe Illustrator to produce an outline of the starburst, dove and olive branch, printing it out four times. Each copy was then sprayed with fixative spray to seal it, which stopped the colour wash bleeding through. I cut out the various items to produce stencils – the central outline, the eyes and beak, the branch, and then the starburst ‘prongs’. I used repositionable spray glue to coat the back and adhere the stencil firmly to the canvas before spraying each of the colours on in turn, using a heat tool to dry and heat set between colours. Aside from a bit of overspray and bleed, and a little stencil misalignment, I’m quite pleased with the result. I did a little touching up here and there with some of the Distress Paints, which may be hard to see as they picked up some of the dye layers beneath.
