Stencils + A Time Lapse (8.4.2016)

I decided to go with a bit of a different direction for today's post, due to the suggestion of a friend. It's been a good long while since I've done any videos of my art (and even back when I did they were typically livestreams), so I did a time lapse of an art journal spread I put together.

In the long run, I'm really happy with how these pages turned out.

 As you can see from the video, this is a different journal than the one I have been working in, which is just a composition notebook. Instead, this is an altered clothing catalog/magazine, the kind that they send you for free. I'm nothing if not cheap about my bases for mixed media.

Some notes.

• There are some turquoise dots in the final project that you can see in the photographs that I added after the video was completed. They were simply done with leftover paint from stamping the title and were added with my finger for their random qualities.
• As is typical of me, I started this page intending to work with bright, almost funky colors. That was where I started, but eventually black came into play. What can I say, it's my weakness.

This is a page that I did on a simple folded over piece of card stock. I'm fairly random when it comes to what I decide to alter, as you can see.

The stencil used on this page is from the same pack that I used on the page above, with the four cutouts of a similar shape on the same piece of cardboard. I bought these stencils from Michael's and have gotten a significant amount of use out of them - I would highly recommend them.

In the long run, I really do like the way this turned out - it's extremely encouraging to me that I'm enjoying the look of most of my recent output. It's like everything I used to know and do is slowly coming back to me, bit by bit, and it's a great form of stress relief.

• In the left hand photo, you can see some details that I love. After the stenciling and a good bit of coloring had been done, I stamped over the entire page with a small hand carved stamp I did on an eraser. This photo also shows the details of where I stuck down some bits of masking tape underneath a few of the layers.
• On the right, the thing that stands out the most to me is the outline surrounding the page. I had used bright pink Portfolio pastels to outline the page and smeared it around before using a regular 2B pencil to draw into the pastels. It then proceeded to smudge with my fingers like it had been meant to do just that. I'll have to look into this technique more in the future.

Though the intention of an art journal is to experiment, rather than exclusively create pages that you like, I believe that these two examples say a lot. The more art you create, the more likely you are to come up with something you enjoy.  

So until next time, keep creating, and I'll see you then!