Art Journal Bits 1

I felt like sharing a few bits from an art journal I'm working in lately - and loving.
I have so much fun making the backgrounds! It's been totally addictive for me and feels very therapeutic. I get into a meditative state while doing it that far surpasses anything I've gotten from traditional meditation. I'm so totally 'in the moment' that I'm unaware of time passing - sometimes hours.

juicy acrylic backgrounds scraped on with an old credit card

A huge amount of appreciation is beaming around the world from me to Hanna, whose great posts on altering books inspired me to get a great, spiral-bound Tai Chi manual for a few dollars second hand. Note that because my book is spiral-bound, I skipped the step of removing alternate pages.

another background using scraped acrylic, glued in napkins, marker

These backgrounds are so fast and easy - I love using the scraped-on paint method. Pencil crayon goes beautifully over top of acrylic paint.
The nice, thick pages that hold up well to acrylic paint and fun words to leave peeking through paint:



Thanks for the inspiration Hanna!

Cute Paper Flower... King Arthur had a parrot!

Did you know that King Arthur, of legend, had a pet parrot?
Neither did I!
I bought an Arthurian Mythology book for 50 cents recently to use for altered pages and that tidbit popped up on a page I was using to paint background to use for paper flowers.
I've seen paper flowers on a few different sites and decided to try my hand at making one. You can make them more 3D than this but I wanted to be able to mail it in a regular envelope to a friend.


Here's the front, it hangs on the wall by a string:

Once I realised that I needed a bead on the back to tie the knot to, I decided I may as well make the back look not half bad (but not so nice that my friend would have trouble deciding which should face out:).
The back view:

After I strung the flower, I spun the layers around until I liked how they were, then used dabs of gluestick under each petal to hold them in place.

It lies almost flat on the wall.

There are infinite possibilities for paper flowers or non-flower decorations!
I love having something funky that can fit in an envelope to brighten someone's day.

Materials:

watercolour paint

page from book

scrap paper

double-sided cardstock (middles layer)

homemade 'milk paint' (food colour and evaporated milk with extra milk powder added)

string

sequins

beads

scissors

gluestick

sparkles

Altered Page with soy wax resist

I fell in love with altered pages at the wonderful, rich, joyful and delicious blog Raven Moon Magic via her Paper Moon work.

As always, I am held back from trying new things by my need to 'get it right' on the first try.
I've been trying very hard to get past this limitation and succeeded in this case.
I tried my first altered page recently and did all sorts of things 'wrong' but it made for a great learning experience.

I kept feeling like I 'should' add something more to all of the empty space but nothing is coming to me and I really love the way it looks as is so I am leaving it alone :-)

One of the things I did 'wrong' was to not bother taping the page down evenly.  I will make sure to do that in the future.

Tips:
1.  if you will be using any wet medium on the page, use a book that has thicker pages
2.  tape it down using painters tape
3.  do not remove tape until page is entirely dry.  this will make the page less wobbly or warped from the moisture.
4.  remove page from book carefully (another thing I didn't do well :)
5.  you don't need to use a wax resist to bring out the words - I just preferred that because then I could paint at will and not worry about going carefully around the words
6.  pick words based on what you are drawn to - NOT what 'makes sense'!
7.  the words do not have to tie in with the painting in an obvious way
8.  if using watercolour paint, you can either do the painting first and pick words later - removing the paint over those words with water, or you can pick the words first and do the painting after.  You can see an example of how this will look by the moon in the upper right corner of this piece - the colour was removed after painting. 
*note* some stain will remain.