Getting messy...

I have been getting a lot of art done lately because it is winter here and far too cold to go outside and do anything else. This is the latest little workshop I did at 21 Secrets. It was called Child's Play 2 by Alma Stoller.

I made some canvases using cardboard and paper. I have never been a fan of oval shaped canvases because I can't seem to balance the drawing properly. I did do one because it was part of the workshop but I don't think I will bother making any more of them. The other canvas was easier for me.

 Both are done with acrylics and marker. 

The next part of the workshop was an art journal page. I am making a landscape journal to see if it is easier to design pages for. I started with a collage of paper and a light coat of gesso and blue paint. 

Next I used spray ink with a stencil to make the background. I sprayed over it with water so it blended together in some areas. 

After stamping the page with some copper paint I stenciled the birds and swirls with more acrylics. They didn't stand out enough so I traced around the birds with pen. 

The birds still didn't stand out enough so I dry brushed a little blue paint over the background. Happy with that look I used a marker to write on the page. The final page has a little bit of the copper paint around the edges.

The second page I did for this class was done over a gessoed collage background. I made the tag and painted the face on it. I like the way this one turned out. The cut outs on the background were done from magazine pages. 

Busy with Life Book

I have finally had some time to myself this last couple of weeks and I have been doing a lot of online class work. Today I will share the latest few pages I have done for Life Book. 

This page is almost entirely acrylics, only black, white and cream. The little bit of colour is watercolour pencil applied when the page was dry. It is my favourite page so far. Hmm...I might have said that before, lol. Seriously though I am amazed that I was the one that painted this picture. I have learned so much this year.

This next page is a pocket page. It was bright orange with a little blue around the edges but it wasn't making me happy, so I sprayed the whole thing with blue glimmer spray and now I love it. Sometimes it is okay to keep messing with your work until you like it. The butterflies were cut out and stuck on with foam tape so they are raised.

The last page is not really a page but a series of ATC sized cards. They are meant to be little pieces of inspiration to look at in my studio. They are embossed cards with several layers of paint that has been sanded to expose the underlying colour. The images are magazine cut outs.

I have realised that I have not been sharing any of my techniques of late and that was the main reason for starting this blog. I am going to start taking more photos as I work so I can share techniques that are not specific to any class or teacher. If the technique I use was not learned in a class then I will try to remember to share it. I have learned so much from other generous artists that I want to do the same.

Just making art

I used to think you had to be really good at drawing or making a living with art to call yourself an artist. I now know that is not true. 
I have gone to art galleries and looked closely at masterpieces. You don't have to be able to draw realistically to call yourself an artist. 
There are lots of people who make art without getting paid anything for it.You don't have to sell art to be an artist.
Art and artist have as many definitions as people who talk about it. For me, art is merely something I like to look at and I am an artist because I like to create things that I find beautiful. Not everything I make turns out the way it is in my head but that doesn't stop me from making it anyway.

The latest class I did at 21 Secrets was with Christine Mason Miller and was about adding words to your page. I did the background with dye sprays and also glimmer mists. I had put gesso on the page first and for some unknown reason the sprays didn't stick in some areas leaving the white dots. I left them because they looked like stars. The butterflies were stamped on but I didn't like the way they looked so I painted over them.

The next page I did was with textured gesso and acrylic paints. The phrase was on the book page that I used as a background. The dandelion is a stamp. This is probably one of my favourite pages so far.

Art journaling...

Art journaling has taken over my creative time at the moment. At the start of the year I decided I was going to take a lot of online classes this year to learn new techniques because there are no real life classes like that on offer where I live. I have been so busy with them that I have not done any other creative work. I don't think that is a bad thing but I don't know where this will all lead. At the moment 21 Secrets is the class I am most interested in.

The other day I did a workshop there run by Tracie Hanson. She is an amazing artist and I love the look of her work. Her lesson was very well put together and I finally used black outlines in a piece that I am happy with. I have always struggled with using a lot of black in my art, it usually looks wrong to me.

This page is acrylics with black pencil outline and oil pastel details. Not my usual style but an interesting idea. It still needs some words but I can't decide yet what they are.

Lots of birds came out on this page. There is some sort of story here but I haven't found it yet. I do like this style of art and will do it again, maybe even on a canvas.

Two days in a row!!

As promised I have more art to share. After Joynal finished last week I decided to get some of my other classes done. I have already shown you some of Life Book but today I am going to share some more of the 21 Secrets classes. If you are new to art journaling then this class would be a good one to learn a lot of different techniques in.  

This time I did a watercolour class with Julie Fei-Fan Balzer. She seems like a fun person in the videos and I would do other classes with her. She gave a lot of information in a short time and provided a good pdf to go with the class. I did a little booklet with samples of the techniques she showed us, as well as the 3 complete pages I will show here. 

This first page has a watercolour background with white acrylic on top. I want to add some words but I haven't decided what just yet.

The next page is a watercolor stencilled background with acrylic painted flowers on top. I like the way this page turned out.

The last page is watercolour sprays with watercolour stamping and marker writing. I copied a computer font for the writing, I think this one was the Weird Girl font. I used white pen to make the image a little clearer.

Creativity unleashed.

I have been very productive lately. I think I am making up for all the days at the start of the year when I didn't do much art. I will share my latest Life Book pages today and some of the other work I have been doing later in the week.

This first page is an eagle shaman. I don't really like borrowing parts of other people's religions (for example, totem animals, karma, shaman, goddesses etc) and there has been quite a bit of that on Life Book. I think that is why so many people struggle with the lessons. I am doing Life Book for the art only so I ignore the religion part if I can but for this lesson I really liked the eagle mask on the girl so I stuck with it this time. I used acrylics, watercolor crayons, pencils and marker for this piece.

This next page was a lesson by Tam the Life Book creator. I find side profiles really hard to draw and took a long time to get this one right. I don't think I will be racing out to do another one any time soon, lol. The background was done by laying stencils onto the page then spraying with dye inks. I did it twice, the second time using glimmer mist. I liked the way it looked so I didn't do anything on top of that. The girl is acrylics and pencils. I used a computer font to copy for the writing.

Drawing my heart out.

I have tried for a couple of days to load my latest Life Book page but blogger keeps rotating the photo so if you want to see it the right way up you will have to check out my flickr page. I think the colours makes the blogger uploader think it is a tree instead of a kangaroo! I can't even rotate it once it is loaded. It has frustrated me a little, lol. Can you tell?

Ah well, at least I can share some other work the right way up. I have just finished my 8th week of the Joynal course with Jane Davenport. This course marks a big development in my drawing of figures. I finally seem to understand where everything goes without too much thinking about it. This page has a piece of silk organza glued to the page first then Dylusion sprays were used with acrylic paint and allowed to drip. I sprinkled salt crystals onto the page before the paint was dry to get the spots. The mermaid was painted then coloured with pencils. The tail is PVA glue, heated with a glue gun (outside) and coloured with Golden Fluid acrylics and metallic rub on paints. In real life the tail is much lighter and golden but it didn't photograph very well.

I thought this was the final piece for Joynal but Jane has posted one more challenge for us so I will probably do that too.