Mixing Digital and Physical + A Sketchbook Page

Today the art I focused on doing was a lot more oriented towards drawing and not so much painting, but I suppose the first piece could technically be considered mixed media.

This is definitely one of my favorite things I've finished in a good long while, and I'm happy that I even managed to come up with the concept in the first place. It's definitely something I'm going to have to explore in the future. I scanned the page from my art journal I painted yesterday into my computer to start things off.

A big thing I wanted to do was make this painting feel more finished, so I opened the scan in Photoshop and used my drawing tablet to add solid black outlines. I love the way this turned out, and the lines from the composition paper showing through add a sort of subtle touch that I love.

The second thing I have to share with you all today was a age that I finished in my sketchbook (you can see the marker lines peeking through on the opposite page from this sketch) that I absolutely adore.

When I started this page, the only real idea I had in mind was the girl in the lower left hand of the page. I didn't even realize that I was going to give her a body (which is why the one side of her body is sort of falling off of the page), but I'm glad that I did in the long run. She's a character that I'd love to give a final version eventually. 

After I had given her a little bit of work, I started to develop other concepts and felt the need to put them down as well. After it was all said and done, an hour and a half had passed and this was the result. Sometimes a little bit of pointless sketching is great stress relief, and this was one of those instances.

In the long run, today was more of a time to recover from working four days with long hours in a row. I watched a couple of movies and got nice and inspired in that regard, and the ideas are slowly but surely starting to merge and work themselves out. 

Thank you all for joining me, and I hope you're all as excited to see what the next couple of days (that I have off) will hold!

Art Journal Video + Four Faces

Hello everyone, I'm back and this time I have my third art journal video ever to share with all of you. I know I haven't been incredible consistent with making videos, and I'm not going to promise to do so because I honestly don't have the time to edit them a lot of the time.

However, I am going to be making them whenever I can (most likely on days I don't have to work, like today). I'm also not going to be expanding upon the photographs too much, only because I added captions to my video this time around. However, I will be adding a few comments, so stay tuned!

I broke out the better camera to take these photographs today (honestly, I had just kept forgetting to use it, but I'm glad that I remembered, since these are much clearly and generally better). In the above photograph, you can see a bit of the page opposite the one I was actually working on. You can also see me adding things to it in the video. Essentially this is how I clean my brushes and my stamps, as well as test out ideas. Then I just work over top of the layers later.

In these two photographs, you can see the quote a bit more clearly. I heard this the other day and I just couldn't get it out of my head. I knew that it would become an art journal page eventually, and when I ended up creating a circle with wings that looked good, but didn't really make sense, I knew it was perfect.

I thoroughly enjoy this little section of the page. I grouped the majority of the main elements of the page down in this corner, which gives it a lot of interest (while at the same time using the rest of the page as a way to even out the overall feeling of the piece). 

Finally, I would like to finish the sharing of this page off with what is probably my favorite photograph of it. In the long run, the idea was to work with bright colors. I was starting to miss them after so many warmer tones recently, and I'm glad that I made the decision to do an abstract piece instead of a face (not that I dislike faces, don't get me wrong).

For this page, I'm linking to Creative Artiste Mixed Media for "anything mixed media goes".

Speaking of faces, I did some doodles this morning in an attempt to practice some faces that weren't straight on (not including the girl in the upper left). I think it's fairly obvious that I don't do it very much, but that's exactly why I knew that I needed to practice doing so. I used Prismacolor pencils again today for these sketches - they give a bit of a different look than the Derwent ones that I really like. They both act differently, and because of that, I'm glad that I'm experimenting with both.

Thank you so much for visiting and commenting, it really means a lot to hear from all of you! I hope you enjoyed today's post.

A Concept Come to Life (9.5.2016)

 Seeing as today was Labor Day and I spent most of it visiting with family, I only have a quick face to share with all of you today (I might work on some mixed media later tonight, but I have to work early tomorrow so we'll see).

This had been a concept in my mind for the past couple of days, and I decided to give it a shot. It didn't turn out quite as great as it had been in my head, but I do like the way that it turned out, even if it does look better from a distance.

Despite the fact that I like it better from a distance, I'll allow some closer photographs anyways.

• In both of the above photos, you can see the line where I erased away the skin shading a good bit to create a more defined edge. If I had a do over, I wouldn't have done any skin shading at all, and would have left the details of the face (the eyes, the eyebrows, the nose and the mouth) as the only bits of drawing and shading. However, I got a little overenthusiastic with the shading and wanting to add hair and ended up having to blend it out.
• On the left, you can see some of the finer details of the eyelashes. I don't know why I like these eyelashes in particular, but I did feel like it was one of the more interesting touches of this piece, especially in all of its simplicity.
• In the right photo, you can see what is probably my favorite parts of this entire face. I entirely adore the way the watercolor dried, even if it did smudge a bit. The line where the watercolor didn't even make it was also cool and thoroughly enjoyed. The highlights in the lips are another plus.

As I said at the beginning of this post, I don't have a whole lot to share with all of you, but I hope that you enjoyed the face that I did come up with. In the end, I like her, even if I would do her differently if I had another shot (and who knows, maybe I'll try this concept again in the future!).

Thank you all for visiting, and I hope you all had a good day. I look forward to seeing you all next time.

Neon Pink + An Oil Pastel Face (9.1.2016)

It's been a little over a week since I last posted, but it's for good reason.

I haven't really been making a whole lot of art (except the past couple of days I broke because I was already starting to miss it) because I've been working on organizing my art space. Ever since we moved into this house, I don't think that it's ever been properly organized. And by that, I mean a place for everything and everything in its place. It's been clean, but never full out organized.

I'm still not quite done with it, but I've made significant progress, and it's incredibly inspiring. Today, I hope I can inspire you.

As you can see both from the photos above and the photo that started the post off, I've really been enjoying working with bright colors recently. I still like my dramatic bits of black, but I've been trying to experiment a bit.

• Circles have always been aesthetically pleasing to me, and in the photo on the left, you can see four instances of where I used them. I cut some circles out of a piece of phone book paper and glued them down, made some dots with the end of my paintbrush, stamped a dot/circle stamp, and did some paint splatters.
• As far as the paint splatters are concerned, I made them with watered down white acrylic paint, let them dry partially, then picked up what was left with a paper towel. That's why they come across more like outlines of circles (I didn't outline them painstakingly, I promise). 
• Recently I acquired a white gel pen, and I had some fun doodling on this page and playing around with it. The white dots within the yellow ochre circle, and the lines in the crosses were all a result of that.  

Recently I've been inspired by Rae Missigman's 15 Minutes of Mixed Media on youtube. She's a big part of the thoughts behind this page, and the whole reason I decided to add neon pink to my paint collection. I would highly recommend that you check her out. 

Something I'm also extremely excited to announce (if I can even call it an announcement) that I'm doing is participating in 29 Faces for the month of September. I was looking around for something I could do this month, due mostly to the fact that it's officially a new month, and stumbled across this amazing challenge.

I can't guarantee that all the faces I do for this challenge will be mixed media (I already have some digital ideas floating around in my head), but the first one absolutely is. There's some collage (her face was a newspaper page cut into the shape of a face and worked on), oil pastels, acrylic paints and graphite. The watercolor look of her hair was thanks to my Portfolio water soluble oil pastels.

I can't even begin to explain how happy I am with the way she turned out. This page is a bit of a work in progress, as I still have a background to go, but as far as the face is concerned, I think I'm going to leave well enough alone. Just creating this face got the ideas flowing for other types of art, and I'll probably be working in my sketchbook based on this before too long.

I'm super excited to see what the rest of this month will hold, and I hope you'll join me in the adventure!

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!