Category: Tutorials, Prompts, and Ideas

Somebody from a Yahoo group I am in asked me the other day what I did on the 3rd spread of my Lent journal and wanted a little info on how I did my journals, and I thought I would add my response to my blog, in case anyone else is interested…

"I’m more than happy to share my techniques on my journal pages with anyone that is interested, it’s just a matter of remember what the heck I did!

This journal was my first real art journal, and I jumped all over in it as opposed to filling up one page before moving on to the next. Since it was my first and I was intimidated, I wanted to be as loose andflexible as possible, so then it was fun not nerve wracking. That is why so many pages on my site are unfinished, although I need to update as many are much fuller now. Anyway, I did a ton of different things on the 3rd spread, so unfortunately the explanation will probably be long, but people can skip over the parts they find boring. 🙂

The left side of the spread is a mix of acrylics and watercolor (think orange and quinacridone magenta) – what I usually do is get the whole page of watercolor paper wet, then brush and drip on watercolor paint and liquid acrylic I have leftover in my pan from doing something else and let the water do all the work spreading it around. The big smear of orange was a bit of leftover tube acrylic spread on with a palette knife (if I have leftover paint I don’t know what to do with, it gets smeared in my journal :)). The little squares with the face, dress, and teacup were drawn in first and painted around when I did the background – I used a black micron pen, then pale watercolors that had dried up in my dish. I was in a very feminine, hip sort of girly shopping mood, but since I almost never shop, I just painted it out.

I wrote the little musing in watercolor pencil, first in light green, then in dark green cuz it was hard to see. I was in Starbucks at the time and saw something that amused me, and so I wrote it down. People really amuse me – not in a making fun of them sort of way, but in a way that notices and appreciates how different God made everyone – I likethe unique quirkiness of people, when some interesting part of their personality comes out. I enjoy people’s individuality, it helps me to understand and appreciate people better, to have a sense of humor, and to not take myself so darn seriously.

The right side I am blanking on – I think it was another wash of water with sap green liquid acrylic, pink, orange and yellow watercolor, then I did a light wash of gold lumiere on top of it. To do the painting of the girl, I cut a page out of a hardback novel and drew on the girl in using a black micron pen. Next, I scrubbed on some gesso all around the girl to block out most of the writing. All the color you see was using prismacolor nupastels, which are like chalk pastels but a bit denser and more vibrant. The flower was cut out of a wedding magazine. Then I glued the page in the book. I’ve been using the rest of the page for random things like a shopping list, when I needed something to writedown my friend’s new address, etc.

Hope this helps! Let me know if you have any other questions. So sorry I haven’t responded sooner – we’ve had enough happen in one week to last us a month! My husband and I are both down with bad colds, we moved, and my grandmother-in-law went in for emergency double bipass surgery. So it’s been busy!"

I just tried something new and exciting that I thought I’d share. I received a catalogue in the mail the other day at work from a university wanting me to come get a business degree. While I am not interested in pursuing a Master’s Degree in business right now (or perhaps ever), I couldn’t bring myself to throw the book away. It was a thick sort of magazine with good quality pages much thicker than the normal magazine – kind of like a Somerset Studio magazine, but a little thicker feeling. So anyway, I decided to experiment.

First I glued every other page together so they’d be twice as thick, by smearing on some gel medium around the edges in a rather haphazard and messy manner, then flipping over the next page onto the glued page and scraping a credit card along the top to smooth them out. Then I scrubbed on some gesso to mostly white out the words and, when dry, pressed the book down under some heavy books to even it out.

I have since worked in several pages of the book with really good results – so far the pages have taken acrylic, lumiere, chalk pastel, black gesso, tissue, candy wrappers, aluminum tape, and pens of all kinds with no problems. I think this will end up being a really nice art journal for me, and all it cost was one hour’s worth of gessoing and gluing!

So, if you’re cheap like me, you might want to give this a try – it is quite exhilarating to work in such a loose and messy way, and I find myself pretty relaxed when I work in it because it was just trash anyway (like I’m not nervous that I’m "messing up" something I paid precious dollars for). My coworkers are amused at my form of recycling my junk mail – I wonder what the school would think of what I’ve done to their catalogue?? 🙂

I’ll post some of the pages as soon as I have a few done and "postable."