Catching up with DLP

 Today I am sharing a few more journal pages.

 The prompt for this page was about what advice would you give to your younger self. I tried to paint the whole page using only acrylics but in the end added some colored pencil for shadows. I was experimenting with some lettering too.

 I used acrylics and pencils for this page. I started with a photo of myself but it looked odd so I made the eyes bigger and lowered the shoulders. I have been doing too many whimsical faces and want to do more realistic portraits but it is going to take me a while to get used to the different proportions. That might be something I concentrate on next year.

 I did a whole page transfer of a wildflower photo I took. I used TAP (transfer artist paper) paper for the transfer and it only partly worked because of the texture of the paper in my journal. It was hard to see the flowers so I went over them with watercolor pencils but left the background mottled. I was happy with the way it turned out in the end. 

 This page started out as another transfer. I covered a picture with gel medium and left it to dry then turned it over and wet the paper on the back. I rubbed the paper off to leave an acrylic skin with the image stuck to it. I think I didn't allow the gel medium to dry for long enough before I removed the paper. When I glued it into my journal the colors all ran together and it was hard to make out the image. I decided to keep this as my background. I painted some sunflowers using transparent Golden acrylics (I read the labels to work out which ones were most see through) and pen. I dabbed on some glitter glue to the flower centers because the prompt was about all that glitters. Another journal page done.

It seems that most of my journal pages start out with one idea that often goes wrong so I just keep going until I get something I like. There are no mistakes in art and if you learn to not worry about it as you are going along you will have a lot of fun. Happy creating and I will catch up with you next week.

Art journal pages...watercolor and mixed media

 I am sharing some of the watercolours that I have done in my journal each month this year. I got the idea from Gina Rossi Armfield's No excuses art journaling book.

This was June. I used some of the suggestions from Gina's book to decide what to draw and added some seasonal images of my own.

July was a cold month here in Australia so I drew some of the flowers that were blooming then.

August was warmer than usual so we saw the arrival of lots of flowers. It was difficult to limit myself to only a few.

I had a little fun with the springtime animal sketching in September.

A DLP page with the prompt about seeing clearly. I used the quote "...one can only see clearly with the heart. Anything that is essential is invisible to the eyes" to inspire my page. I gessoed and used pan pastels for colour. I added detail with coloured pencils.

Another DLP page inspired by the prompt "If you are going to be weird be confident about it". I glued patterned tissue paper to the page and sprayed it with ink. The characters are painted with acrylics. It was a lot of fun to mess about with the girl and cat.

A new journal page.

Today I am sharing a journal page I did for the Documented Life Project. The art challenge was to use tissue paper and the prompt was 'disappearing trick'.

I found a quote that I liked so that inspired me to do a flower garden. I searched through my stash of printed tissue paper but couldn't find any nice flowers that I wanted to use so I looked through my napkin collection (every art stash hoarding journaler has one, don't they?). I chose a few different napkins and tore the flowers out. I did trim around some of the flowers with scissors.

I first painted my page with white gesso then sprayed on colour with the dylusions spray. When it was all dry I arranged my flower cut outs to look like a garden bed.  I used matte medium to glue down the napkins and left it to dry.

 Uh oh. I knew that the napkins would become transparent when glued down but I didn't expect the dylusions spray that was mixed with the gesso to become bright green and change the flower colours. It was difficult to make out the flowers now so I decided to colour over everything with my prismacolor pencils. I was hoping the creamy wax pencils would cover up a lot of that green and also make the flowers more prominent. I also added some extra leaves in the blank areas and extended the flower stems so they reached the bottom of the page. It was a lot of fun to colour this way. Now I am happy that the page looks the way I imagined. 

 I will share some of my other pages and art I have been working on soon. I am planning to update my blog on Tuesdays from now on so that it forces me to be more regular about updating. I may even add extra posts in between but don't hold me to that.