Landscapes

I really love making landscapes either in textiles or with paint. Last year I did quite a few lessons from the WOWbook series put out by D4Daisy publishers, written by Maggie Grey, that I haven't shared yet.

I had a lot of fun with this WOWbook 2 lesson as it is entirely hand stitched. I never used to like hand stitching at all but after I had children I found it very relaxing in the evenings. I still do.

This second WOWbook 2 lesson is based on  a photo transfer of a paper painted background. More details of the technique can be found in the book.  After doing the transfer I added a little more colour in select areas and then hand stitched the details. Loads of fun and not something I would have thought of on my own.

This next picture is a journal page I painted last year. Although it is abstract I thought it looked like an Australian landscape and wondered if I could do something with it.

After I did the photo transfer lesson from WOWbook I thought I finally had a way I could transfer my picture to fabric so I could stitch it. I first used a photo program to alter the original picture and change some of the colours. I was able to remove the stitching line from the center with the same program (I use Paintshop Pro).  I used my machine to stitch all the objects I could see in the original picture. I saw balloons in the circles in the sky and a fishing shack in the rectangle on the shoreline. It was an interesting experiment that then got me wondering what would happen if I turned the original upside down.

This is the upside down version of the original painting. I significantly lightened the colour to make a very different landscape. I used Pan Pastels to make some areas darker but it is still the same picture underneath.  Again I used simple machine stitching for the drawing of the image.

Next I went back to the computer and altered the original picture to make a sky. I cut some artist canvas to fit in my printer and printed the picture straight onto the canvas using a photo setting on the printer. It fed through my Epson printer without any problems as the canvas is quite stiff.

 The colours came out a little differently, especially the sky which was a lot lighter than I thought it would be. I decided to add colour to the right hand side of the print so I used an alcohol marker to add the green on the right. I used my machine for the drawing using only dark brown coloured thread. It was quite easy to stitch through the canvas as it is really only stiffened fabric, no stabiliser needed. I added some fence posts using mulberry bark cut to shape and after stitching everything I added wire between the fence posts.

I have enjoyed this little exploration of one technique. Sometimes one thing sparks an idea for another and you just have to keep going. I hope you get inspired to do your own versions of a landscape.

Painting patterned trees

The lead up to Christmas for me is a very busy time. I spend a couple of days cooking so I can spend the next couple of days entertaining and enjoying the company of my guests. I like to spend the day after Christmas relaxing and winding down from all that activity.  That usually means sitting down all day to rest my tired feet and painting a new picture for our next year's calendar. I have a perpetual calendar with a blank spot above so I can put a different picture there each year. I like to try something new, either from a book or workshop.

Earlier this year I bought the Painting Patterned Trees video download from Artist's Network.   If you wait for one of their sales you can get a good bargain, I paid half price. The video has lots of information and is very easy to follow.

It is acrylics on canvas with a bit of pen work. The acrylics are very fluid and a different technique to how I normally use them. I love how this project turned out and will probably do more of this type of work in my journal. I think any subject would look good with a bit of doodling on it.

Colour me Positive 2018

I had good intentions to do another year with the Colour Me Positive challenge in 2018. I started out well but as I had to support my daughter with an extremely serious health battle for the first half of the year my interest in keeping up with the art journaling faded away. I will share the pages I did complete here.

  

Week 1: I stencilled gesso onto my page and when it was dry painted it purple and added copper highlights with metallic paste. It is a simple and fast page. 

 Week 2: I used coloured pencils to draw the eye on a background that had been painted then some wiped off before drying. My journal was made from old scrapbook paper that had a thin layer of gesso spread on it with a credit card.  You can still see some of the printed paper through the blue paint.

Week 3: I used a die cut machine to punch butterflies out of left over scraps of painted papers. After they were glued to the page I outlined them to be more visible. 

Week 4: I wanted this page to be focused on the words so I kept it simple. I used a stencil for the lettering on a previously painted paper that was glued in. I then doodled around the painted areas on the page. I did add some more paint in some areas to make them darker. 

Week 5: I had this picture of a vintage lady that I wanted to use so the rest of the page is done using vintage style papers. A little brown ink around the edge of shapes makes everything look old and work together.  

Week 6: This page was an experiment. I traced the sunflowers from another journal page I had drawn onto tissue paper. I then crumpled the tissue and glued it to this double page. While it was wet I sprayed on the blue and green background. When it was dry I used watercolours to paint the flowers and added the insects. 

Week 8: I don't know why I didn't do week 7. This background was randomly made using a credit card to spread three colours around the page. When it was dry I could see a fox face so I added more paint to enhance the face I could see. It is all done in acrylics. 

 Week 9: I got some new watercolours and decided to test them out on this page. Sometimes simple and quick means you get more done.

 Week 10: I wanted to try a masking technique when stencilling. You can see where I placed a circle of paper before using gesso to stencil a pattern over the whole page. When you remove the stencil the circle lifts away too and there is a smooth area to write in. The page was quickly coloured using dye sprays.

Week 11: I wanted to doodle one evening so this page was made. I used a lot of scrap papers and a few collage pictures to make the squares then doodled and wrote on all of them. I love working with grids because it is easy to make a lot of small things and then put them together to make a large piece.

Week 12: This was the last page I did for the year and the last page in this journal. I used perforated paper for the background. It is meant to be used for cross stitch and was in my stash. I wrote out the quote then added a simple border. It was coloured with standard markers.

 The cover of my hand made journal has a picture that I saved from a Flavia calendar. I love her style of art.

The back cover is a collage of some torn. previously painted, paper strips. When it was dry I added the doodles.

The inside front cover was zentangled. Sometimes I just want to sit and draw or doodle. I find it relaxing.

This zentangled page is the inside back cover of the book. That was the end of this challenge for me. I still journal a lot but now I try ideas from the many art books I own. I have decided to stop looking at them and actually do the exercises from the books. It is a fun way to learn new things.

Colour me positive

I have been doing a bit of art journaling for the Colour me Positive challenge at Lulu art. The link is in the sidebar if you want to get more details of the challenge. There is a weekly prize offered for one of the people who upload their creations to Facebook.  I have been enjoying doing more art journaling again.

Week 5 - The challenge this week was a funny quote about body image. I chose this quote because I recently lost a lot of weight and body image has been on my mind often. I used small stickers I had painted previously for embellishments over printed papers. It was a very quick page to do. 

 Week 6 - Acrylics for background and underpainting hands, then stamped texture (blue). I used coloured pencils to add the detail to the painted hands and feet.

 Week 7 - I made a patchwork of painted papers for his shell then stitched them together on my machine. The sky was painted then covered with plastic wrap and left to dry to create the texture. The path is painted tissue paper.

 Week 8 - I wanted to add a flap to my page this week so I could show one of my early portraits compared to a newer one. I got a little carried away with the white pen. The two faces were printed photos of previous work that I glued in.

 
This shows the opened page. I used acrylic paint, some rub ons and a lot of white pen.

Colour me positive week 2

I have fallen behind with my colour me positive challenge already. I think I have been distracted by textile experiments and am unsure whether I will continue or not. In the meantime here is a step by step of my week 2 page.

The quote for this one was "She took the leap and built her wings on the way down"

I decided to sketch a leaping person. It took a while to get it to look right but finally I was happy with the sketch. I used a journal page that was already painted pink with watercolor. 

I used some stencils and acrylic paint to add patterns to the page. I sprayed on some dye ink while the page was still wet to make the paint bleed a bit. 

I wanted to make it a bit more orange so I added a few more stencils and paint.

I couldn't stop myself from having fun and added even more paint because I thought the red stood out too much. I was not unhappy with the finished look but I could have stopped after the first step. 

Next I painted the hessian (or burlap in some countries) white and stamped that onto the page for a different texture. I liked it and added a bit more here and there. I also did the same stamping with green paint and bubblewrap.

 I painted on the leaping figure and used a white pen to add some lines. I added some white dots with a flick of the paint brush. I wrote the quote with a pitt pen and thought that the page was finished.

A couple of days later I decided I wanted to add a little pattern to the green paint of the silhouette so used a stencil and some copper paint to go over the girls dress. Now it is definitely finished.

Colour me Positive challenge - week 1

I have joined a new challenge this year because Documented Life Project have gone back to planners which is not my thing.

The new challenge is hosted by Lulu Art and is called Colour Me Positive. It will be an inspiring experience and they use quotes for prompts so that is exactly the sort of thing I respond to. The link is http://blog.luluart.com.au/challenge/
The prompts are published or emailed weekly on Fridays (Australia time) and it is free to join.

My art goal this year is to finish off a few journals I have started previously so for this first challenge I got out a journal I started during the mermaid circus online class. I didn't like the pages I did with Teesha Moore so I wanted to redo them because the heavy watercolor paper was too good to just throw away.

I removed all of the collaged images from magazines. Some of them came off easily but others ripped the page when removed. I didn't mind because it would give me a textured background to work on. I roughly applied gesso over the top of everything with a credit card. Some of the writing bled through the gesso.

Next I used a stencil and palette knife to spread Molding paste across the page. I tried to go over the areas where the writing was bleeding through so they would not be readable later on.

I used these acrylic paints to cover the gesso when it was dry. It was not an even coat because it would be covered with the sprays I was going to use. I used Lindystampgang Moon Shadow mists in brown and green to spray the page. I like using the sprays to highlight texture because they settle around the raised areas.

I used a few flower stamps along the bottom and some dragonflies. I stamped with StazOn permanent ink in a stone grey color so it wouldn't stand out as much as black would. This was a mistake as it blended into the background too much.

I drew the lady and used acrylic paints to color her in roughly. I added details and shading with colored pencils after the paint had dried for a couple of hours. 

To finish the page I went over the flower stamps with pencils, markers and paint pens. I put tracing paper on top of the page on the right and wrote out my quote. I wanted to make sure it would fit before I wrote onto the page. I used a gel pen for the quote after I worked out where it would fit. The first challenge is now complete and it feels good to do a journal page after not doing any for a couple of months. I am looking forward to the next prompt.

Art journal pages for DLP

 My intention to blog weekly went a little astray last week. Our main computer died suddenly even though it is a SSD drive that is supposed to be extremely reliable. The computer guy who built it said it was the first time he had seen a broken one in 20 years of working. We were just unlucky I guess. Fortunately I have the backup set up to run weekly so we only lost a few documents and none of our photos. It did take a long time to download all our programs again and set them up the way I like. If you haven't done a back up recently I urge you to do one soon.

 Now that I am back I will share some more journal pages. These are more of the Documented Life Project pages.

The challenge for this page was silhouettes and the prompt was "no shadow without the light". I used a credit card to scrape paint across the page for the background then used a stencil to do the flowers silhouette. I used a marker to fill in the lines of the stencil so it was a solid shape.

The art challenge here was to use deli paper. It is a very thin tissue paper with a waxy feel on one side. The waxy side is actually a thin coat of plastic. You can paint on either side but sometimes the paint comes off the waxy side. I used some monoprints I had done previously and just added the quote. It was a very quick page.

The challenge for this one was to use vellum and the prompt was "Sheer genius". I drew the big butterfly on vellum with a permanent marker then all the little ones too. I colored it in on the back using water-based markers so the colors are a little muted. I stitched the vellum butterfly onto white paper, I cut it out and glued it to the page. The page looked a little bare so I added the border as  finishing touch.

Sometimes I surprise myself with the ideas that pop into my head when I find a quote like this one. I would never have dreamed I could do this sort of page a few years ago.

I will probably share a some of the textiles I have been playing with next week so I hope to connect with you then. 

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.