Life Book 2014 — Um, Wow.

I have a bit of an art e-course addiction. I love how many different ones are out there and have learned so much - practically everything, really - from the various ones I've taken. I have a rather substantial backlog of videos to watch, projects to try and posts to read. It's a bit overwhelming at times, but they are so much fun.

I fed my addiction this year big time. I signed up for Life Book 2014 hosted by the wonderful Tamara LaPorte of Willowing Arts. It's a year long course with lessons from 20+ artists in all different kinds of mixed media. I loved the line up of artists this year, some of which I knew through other courses I've taken and some just by way of the online art community. Some were brand new to me.

I have not been disappointed. In fact, I'm amazed at the quality and amount of information we've already received and it's only week 8. I'm blown away. For the money, this is by far the best course I've taken and highly recommend this class to anyone interested in mixed media, newbies and seasoned artists alike. I bought this course for my mom for Christmas since she had expressed an interest in this kind of art. She's loving it, and tells me so about every time I talk with her. She's very creative and has always been artsy and crafty, and passed it on to me, so I knew she'd enjoy the course.

The images here are a few things I've worked on so far. I have to catch up one a week I skipped (oops) but this week is a bit of a break with no assignment, so hopefully I can make the time!

I really can't recommend this course enough. Tam is a delight, both as a person and and artist, and all of the contributing artists have been generous and encouraging. I can't wait to see what the rest of the year brings!

Used Book Finds

My husband I and hit Better World Books yesterday. Have you heard of it? They take donated books and resell them, but that's really all I knew until I read the back-story to write this post. I knew they were located a stones throw from me but didn't realize it was started by two recent Notre Dame grads. You can read their story here.

From the site:

To date, we have raised millions of dollars for literacy, saved millions of books from landfills, created jobs for hundreds of people, and provided wonderful books to millions of readers worldwide. The rest of the story is still being written. We invite you to join us on our journey. It’s only going to get better.

Pretty darn cool. They have an outlet store located at their warehouse and it's filled with books on all subjects and all are less than about $4. It's the bomb. It feels like a really small elementary school library - not fancy at all - but it's a lot of fun to just wander through the shelves, seeing what they have.

In addition to the books right there on the shelves, you also have access to their entire warehouse. Well, not literally. You can't go in there and browse, but all you have to do is ask the wonderful people that work there to look up any title you want. If they have it, they'll put in a request to the warehouse and in less than 10 minutes, you've got your book. It's amazing and I'm still in awe that something this cool is in my backyard, so to speak.

So while we were browsing yesterday, I picked up some new finds. It's THE BEST place to find interesting papers for my art journal or any other mixed media work. Children's books galore (hello, fun illustrations), reference books (Dictionaries! Travel Guides!) as well as many old, amazingly cool hardbound books. I also discovered a new little shelf - foreign language books. SCORE!


Here are the two I picked up. They're both fairly small but full of possibilities.

I honestly don't know what language this is (if you do, please let me know in the comments!) but it's just gorgeous. I had to have it.


This Japanese Chinese book is filled with page after page of beautiful text and also has illustrations scattered throughout. Lovely!



The ultimate find, as far an I'm concerned, is this copy of Longfellow poems. It was from a library that marked it obsolete. Literally.





I was an English Lit major, so I know some of you might be horrified by this, but it's going to make the PERFECT art journal.



I mean, look as the reproductions of hand-written poems. All of the blank space. Every facing page to a page of the poem is blank and there are many completely blank pages at the beginning and end. AND the paper is really nice. *So happy.* It's a little over 7" x 10" and about 1/4" thick. I love it.

p.s. I'll be gathering some of these pages as well as going through all of my other papers to make some super awesome paper packs for my Etsy store, so be on the lookout for that! I always include some original art tags and other goodies in my paper packs.

Weekend fun

Here are some things I've been working on this weekend...

A cute little doodle tag. Lots of time for such a small piece, but it was very fun.

I planned on turning this canvas into a similar piece – doodles and dots and swirls...

but it's kind of calling me in a different direction. I'm going to sit with it some more and see where I decide to go with it.

This is a work in progress from my art journal. I glued a magazine ad to the page, covered it with gesso and then painted over it using my fat Pitt pens/brushes and some black ink. Not sure what else I'm going to do to it, but I really like how it looks. 

And here's something I've been working on for a little while. 

This is before I messed with the hair/circles area. I'm not happy with what I did, so I'm going to fix it, but I love love love how it looks here. The texture is from tissue paper. I LOVE what that does to the painting. I think it adds an incredible amount of interest. 

I hope you did something fun this weekend!

Art Journal - Doodling in Paint

Here's a page I finished up today. I created the background about two weeks ago and set it aside because I wasn't sure where to go with it. I really liked the way it looked but knew it wasn't finished. That's a tough place for me. It's my sticking place - afraid to "ruin" what I've done but knowing it needs to change.

So I reminded myself - There is nothing precious about this. You made it for fun, just keep going.

I flipped through Traci Bautista's fabulous book Doodles Unleashed to gather inspiration. It worked! I grabbed my white Sharpie paint pen and started doodling. I added more acrylic, covered up, made circles, added dots, and on...

I covered up much of the initial Sharpie doodling but wanted to bring that whimsical feel back, so I used the end of the paint brush to "draw" petals back onto the circle flowers. LOVE.

I added some journaling and called it done. I really liked the initial background, but by pushing through my sticking point and moving forward, I now love the page. Flora Bowley says (at least something similar to this) we have to let go of what we like to make room for what we love.

Art Journal Calendar – February

I follow a number of art blogs and thoroughly enjoy seeing what others are doing and getting inspired by them. One such is The Kathryn Wheel by Kate Crane. She's a wonderful mixed media artist and does a monthly art journal calendar which I thought was brilliant. One place to keep a year's worth of short notes for each day. I missed January, but got my act together for February. I forgot to take a "before" photo, but here is the completed month.

I'm using a leather bound journal I bought years (like 9 years) ago originally as a gift. It's a gorgeous handmade paper journal with a warm, deep brown leather cover and tie.



Then I remembered the intended recipient was vegan and realized a leather bound journal would probably not be the best idea. It's been sitting on my shelf, waiting for... I'm not sure what. I'm terrible about "saving" things for a special occasion or the "perfect" time, and decided that NOW was the perfect time. I mean, look at these delicious pages!




p.s. Here's a peak at March...

Easy Art Journal Background – Use Your Table Paper!

Here's a really easy way to create an "instant" background in your art journal - if you use paper to protect your work surface, that is. If you use a fancy wipeable one, you're on your own. ;)

I love how my paper looks after it's been thoroughly used. I hate to throw away such deliciousness, so I cut away the good parts and keep them handy for future use. One of the quickest and easiest things to do is use them as your ready-to-go art journal background.



Slap it into your book with some gel medium under and on top and BAM! You're good to go.

I didn't add anything to this background, just used it as is and added more paint on top for the face and used a Sharpie paint pen (extra fine) for the journaling.

I love how it turned out. Try it some time. It's a great way to get a jump start on your art journal page.

Fun with Tags

So I bought some manilla tags the other day.



Some = 1,000. Yes, really. They were a great deal, I'd been wanting some for a long time, and I have Christmas money burning a hole in my pocket. So what the heck!



Back in late fall, I took advantage of a special Andrea Sher (of Superhero Journal) offered for her Mondo Beyondo e-course. I'd been eyeing it for at least a year, so when it went on "sale" I just had to sign up. For one of the exercises, I decided to put the new tags to use.

First thing I did was line them up since I figured I'd create a bunch at one time. I used Golden fluid acrylic paint, some cosmetic sponges, a few 12" x 12" stencils and went to town.



I used the sponges to apply the paint through the stencils. They work great and I can pick them up cheap at Dollar General. I also used them to distress the edges.



Quick and fun. Gotta love it.




Here are the two main stencils I used.


"Art Is" by Crafter's Workshop


Random Dots by Donna Downey

Paint colors used:
Golden Fluid Acrylic in Nickel Azo Gold, Phthalo Turquoise, Permanent Violet Dark, and Quinacridone Red.

Art Journal - Reverberate

I've decided to dedicate more time to my art journal. Have fun, explore ideas, mediums, products, techniques. So yesterday I had the start of an idea and went from there. I knew I wanted to punch circles out of various things and stitch them to paper. That's all I knew. The rest I just made up as I went along.

I pulled a page out of my "for art purposes" copy of Jane Eyre as my base, grabbed my stash of various paper pieces and rifled through them. I found more book paper, ledger paper, a map, a receipt, a ticket, a tea bag wrapper (yes, I saved a tea bag-it was still attached to the wrapper), and a wine label. I have a number of wine labels I've soaked off bottles intending to put them in a wine journal for future reference but never got around to it. I like the idea of using them in my art journal even better.

I used various stencils, homemade "spray paint", Donna Downey's hollyhock stamp, acrylic paint, various tubes to get the red circles, masking tape, a white Sharpie paint pen, black pen and drywall tape.

OH! And I FINALLY set up my sewing machine in my art room and added stitching. It's something I've wanted to do for a long time and finally did. Yea, me!

I thought the circles looked like the were pulsing or echoing, and the word "reverberate" came to mind. Today, I went ahead and finished it up buy putting the page in my journal. I had a incredibly icky page that I covered up with more paint, and added the page. I was looking for my glue but saw the drywall tape and thought it might work, and I love it! I then added more stitching, zig zagging the book page directly into my journal.

I love the colors, repetition of the circles and the stitching. Very happy with this page!

Art Journal Play - Seeing Faces

In case you hadn't figured it out already, I love to draw faces. That's been true since high school. I would lose myself sketching stylized faces. I went a very long time without putting pencil (or paint) to paper but never lost the pull to draw faces.

Having immersed myself back in art over the last year and a half has reminded me of that pull. I've taken various on-line art courses that have me drawing more and more faces, specifically I Heart Drawing by Jane Davenport. Love her, LOVE this course.

I have a couple of art journals going, and in most, I have half-finished backgrounds mostly the result of slapping my leftover paint on a page as not to waste it. This is one such page. I was flipping through the book, saw this page and thought it would be fun to paint a face over the top. I wish I'd gotten a shot before I worked on the face, but you can see quite a bit of it through the face.

I'm mesmerized by her. Sure, her eyes are a bit wonky and she's rather lopsided, but I think she's darling, if I do say so myself!

Workshop Journaling – "Never Stop Growing"

So I have this bad habit of signing up for workshops and puttering out about 3/4 of the way through - or sooner. In this case, much sooner. I signed up for the Art of Wild Abandonment class with Junelle Jacobsen and Christy Tomlinson, and it's SO PACKED with information that I got a rather overwhelmed and stopped watching the videos and doing any work with the workshop assignments. It's a good problem to have in a workshop, I admit - so much information. I've loved everything we've done so far and I'm not even through week 2. It's a 3 week class, but don't let that fool you. There are at least 3 projects each week and about 10 videos. Each. Week. You might see how I got behind!

ANYway. I made a promise to myself to get back to the videos and get messy again with my art journal. I've neglected it in a terrible way. I want to create more often (every day!) and want to practice lots of different techniques, and one of the ways to do that is dust off my art journal, grab my laptop and supplies, and get the most from the Art of Wild Abandonment workshop.

Today I did just that and had the MOST fun with this page. Ahhhh. It's good to be back.

Materials used:
Gesso
Inktense pencil
Acrylic craft paint
Pen
While poster paint pen (Sharpie brand)
Distress ink
Roller word stamp
Various papers
Brown paper bag
Punchinella/sequin waste

Art Journal 01.31.12 — Free

This page was inspired by a few things. First of all, the background was created so I could mess up my hands for this photo.

You can see the patterns in the paint on my hands on the page, even though I brushed over it, smearing all of the various textures together.

See the blue areas to the right and along the bottom? You can see that pattern in white on my hands. That's from sequin waste, also called punchinella.

Another influence is a canvas my niece painted for me for Christmas 2 years ago.

It's one of my most treasured possessions. I was so touched that she painted it for me and love how strong and bold it is. Just like my niece, actually!

The other influence on this page is the art of Alisa Burke. She's wonderful and I hope to take at least one of her online classes very soon.

I love the "stained glass" effect that happened when I added the wax pastels in the petals. Wasn't intentional, but I think it's very cool.



For the flower, I wasn't sure how I was going to handle "coloring" it, but I went with the pastels because they'd be transparent. I kept looking at the strong black outline and thinking I needed to add to that, doodle a bit and then add the white for some contrast. I'm really happy with how it turned out.



Mediums Used:
acrylic paint, various colors
water soluble wax pastels
ink

Other Materials:
punchinella
bubble wrap
shelf liner
paint brushes in various sizes (bottoms used to make the white dots)

Making a Mess

Sometimes winging it means making a mess. Eh, it happens. I wanted to play with modeling paste and a sketch I'd scribbled out months ago, so I did. And it got ugly. I tried to cover things up, add, drip, shade, but it just never came together.


Getting started. See my sketch reference to the left. That cardboard ring is from a roll of stickers from work. I used it as the template for the face. I used the green circle thingy as a stencil for the modeling paste.


I used my water soluble wax pastels to color in the face and hair.


You can kind of see where I'd randomly placed some masking tape before I gessoed over the top.


Modeling paste applied. Not loving it at this point... and it all went down hill from there...



Sometimes you just end up with a mess. And have a lot of fun doing it! Sure, there was some frustration, but mostly I just laughed about it. Enjoy the process, learn, move on. YAY, ART!