Tag Archives: backgrounds

February and March Journaling

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Here are some recent art journal pages. I have neglected my blog in the last couple of months, perhaps because I’m not sure whether anyone actually looks at it. Maybe people are looking at it, but just not making comments. Anyway, I thought I’d better do a catch up post before we take off for Europe in a weeks time. (So excited!)

I arranged a song called “Something opens our wings” based on a poem by Rumi for our Sanctuary group, plus I had this painting of a dark angel from an old calendar, and the page just came together. I “channelled” a letter from my dark angels telling me that its OK to be depressed sometimes. I LOVE this page.

The beloved local newspaper in Byron bay is called the Echo, and after I did some undercollage using the Echo I decided to turn it into a page about how I love living in the Byron Shire. I love the map border on the left, and  I used the trusty old plastic lacey tablecloth as a stencil. I LOVE this page too!

One week in our art journaling class we were challenged to draw something directly into our journals. I drew my hand drawing and turned it into this page about creating yourself. Since the drawing was grey pencil I tried out just having a whole grey scale page for a change and I like it.

 

For this next page our assignment was to cut 2 different landscapey pictures into interesting geometric shapes and fit them together. Since I have travel on my mind this is what I came up with.

And to finish this post here are 2 backgrounds which I have begun to collage and now I don’t know what to do next. This first one I think is so beautiful I’m afraid to do anything else to it.. The second one I think I’m liking the way its going,….but I’m not sure where that is exactly.

 

The background is quite textured ( I gessoed through the plastic tablecloth, let it dry, then painted over it with watery cobalt blue and raw umber) I shall be interested to see what appears on the left hand side.

I’ve been busy preparing some painted backgrounds in the journal I will be taking with me to Europe. I’m not planning on taking my acrylic paints, just a small watercolour travel set. I’m totally inexperienced with watercolour, so….it will be interesting!

Two backgrounds

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Here are two backgrounds waiting for me to do something with them. This first one is a bit textured: I used some kind of plastic mat to stamp some gesso, painted over it with orange acrylic and rubbed it back so you could see the gesso underneath. I had also painted a few gesso words, I think “no thought” and “play”. When the orange was dry I painted burnt umber over all and rubbed it back too. The page sat like that for a few weeks waiting for some attention and everytime I looked at it it seemed to say “Fire”. Then one week in my art journaling class with Zom we were asked to create some black gesso areas on one of our backgrounds so I chose this one and painted black across the centre creating the flames. This is quite a strong background now, I don’t quite know how to approach adding something to it. It would be likely that the background would overpower anything I might stick on top of it! Will keep you posted.

Here is another background awaiting a “foreground”. It was created in a similar way to the previous one only in this one I collaged down some pieces first…some music, a black and white photocopy of a photo of me in younger days, a page from the dictionary with definitions of love.Then I stamped some gesso using bought stamps and bubble wrap, and when that was dry painted 2 different shades of blue. Obviously I don’t know many different techniques yet for creating backgrounds! This was actually really fun to do because I was showing my friend Ruth (who has recently acquired the art journaling bug!) a couple of background techniques and we were working together at my dining room table, and having a lovely relaxed creating time. Anyway, I do like this blue background and I trust that one day it will become clear to me what I must put over it!