Mixed Media Canvas Panel + Gelli Printing

 As I look back over the pieces I've done for the 29 Faces challenge, even though we're only halfway through the month, I am continuously impressed and happy with my progress.

Lately I have come to the realization that pushing myself into new directions is a key way of achieving this progress, so I have attempted to make strides in new and interesting directions. Today's face (a painted one for the first time in two days!) serves to do just that.

This piece was done on a 4"x4" canvas panel, so not only is it a size I'm unused to for paintings, I've also never done a face on a canvas panel at all. That wasn't the only way that I challenged myself, with this piece, but it was certainly part of it. A side note, the canvas panels are a bit of a sneak peek at a future project I will be taking on after September is over, so get hyped.

In taking a closer look at the piece, you can hopefully see that though the surface I was working on was small, I attempted to add layers of interest anyways. I couldn't help myself.

• In the photo on the left, you can the the tiniest hint of a collage piece that I started this square off with. If you watched the video I posted the other day, you may have seen me messing around with a photocopy of a piece of bubble wrap I thought the colors had blended beautifully on. I have several copies of it, actually, but I've been wanting to actually use it. This small surface gave me the change to do just that, and it adds a fun pop of pink.
• The butterfly is a stamped image on newspaper that has been cut out and collaged on top of the hair - fun fact, I originally attempted to stamp directly onto the canvas, but it didn't work out - so I just used my test stamp, since the light blue paint in the background worked perfectly. 
• In the right hand photograph, you can see some of the finer details and textures of this girl's face. It was definitely a challenge to work in a small size like this, especially since I was just starting to get used to using certain brushes for painting portraits. However, it worked out in the long run. 

• This is potentially the most simple part of this mixed media piece, but also potentially my favorite part. Not only did I use yellow ochre, my current favorite color, but I love the way it looks against the gray watercolor.
• Another favorite part of this little portion is the way the hair seems to blend or merge outside of the lines and into the background, as well as the tiny little bit of text stamp that is visible at the very top of the photograph. 

In the end, I think this face turned out extremely well - the bright blue, yellow and pink stand out against the gray, white and black in a way that I personally like a lot. I'll have to play with the yellow ochre and gray color combination again in the near future!

In addition to finishing the above tiny painting, I also received a Gelli plate in the mail today (I had ordered it a few days back, along with the canvas panels), and I got to play around with it and the paint I had leftover on my palette.

Let me tell you, this was a lot of fun. I think my favorites have to be the pink and brown numbers, and the yellow ochre (surprise) circles in the lower right hand corner. I really love the way those prints in particular turned out, but I'm definitely going to have to put all of these to good use in the near future!

After an extremely stressful past couple of days, it was nice to be able to just sit down with some paint and just play. The more I make art on a regular basis, the more I start to realize just how important it is to me as an individual, both to my mood and the number of creative ideas I have. 

Thank you all for visiting, I appreciate each and every one of you! I hope you all have a nice day, and I'll see you next time.

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 Face and Its Remnants (9.11.2016)

After the change with yesterday's face in doing a digital piece, I'm back to mixed media. As you can probably see from the sporadic nature of this blog, I don't like to feel tied down to one medium when it comes to my artwork. I feel like I learn more when I'm constantly learning and practicing new things. 

However, with this piece in particular, I'm working on cardboard again, and for this series in particular I'm sort of attempting to stay with a vaguely similar style for the pieces. This is the first time I've really worked in a series like this (and there's a bit of a secret to it, I'd be curious to see who'll guess first), so I'm really excited about it. 

I'm also particularly happy with today's face (face 12/29 for 29 Faces), so without further ado, let's move on to talking about it.

• I'm sort of in love with the tones in this face. I used a lot of pinks and yellows and blended with brown and just the tiniest bit of white. After the tones in the face had started to come along, I didn't really feel the need to brighten it up too much. It just felt like if I added anything too crazy, it'd be overwhelming. So, I stuck with muted colors overall, adding a few pops of orange in her lips and the flower. The colors are pretty much my favorite part of this painting.
• In the photo on the left, you can see the hairstyle a bit better. It didn't turn out quite as I was expecting, but I'm okay with it. However, the hairstyle was the inspiration for the piece - my sister was wearing her hair like this the other day and I couldn't resist.
• Then we come to the right hand photo. The texture here is crazy. I'm pretty sure that every time I paint on cardboard I comment on the amazing texture, but I just can't help myself. It's incredibly fun to mess around with, and I think everyone should try it at least once. We all have boxes lying around that are waiting to be thrown away - why not cut one down and give it a go?

 I'm not really going to expand on these photographs too much, but they're both from my Instagram story; if you're interested in seeing more progress shots, I've been posting a lot of them there lately.

• As you can see, the first photograph depicts my rough sketch - and when I say rough, I mean extremely rough. My sketches are purely guidelines, I don't try to overthink it too much. In the long run, they're going to be mostly painted over anyways, so I can make adjustments with paint.
• The second photo is after some paint had already been applied. Typically I'll go over the skin tones again with a second pencil outline, more defined and to give me a chance to actually outline with the black paint like I've been doing for this series.

The second mixed media piece I have to share with you guys today is probably the first finished art journal page I've actually done since I started the 29 Faces challenge (you can see the traces of my first face on the edge of the page above).

Essentially, it went something like this. 

Lately, once I'm finished painting faces, I have a random assortment of colors on my palette, since it's much easier to apply them there when I'm painting a portrait. A lot of time this leftover paint goes to waste, since I don't always use it and it dries out. I was getting tired of that happening, so I decided to create a journal page to use it all up. 

Since the  colors I used for the face were very autumn-like, I decided that it might be fun to participate in the "colors of autumn" challenge over at Stamps and Stencils. So that's what this page was created for!

• When I was sorting through some of my art supplied recently, I found some old rubber stamps I had forgotten I owned, the leaves stamped throughout the page. Only one is clearly visible, but there is a second, more narrow leaf stamp you can see if you look closely.
• In the photo on the left, you can see one of my favorite little portions of the page. Here, the layers haven't been built up as much as in some other areas of the page, and the lines of the composition book and some pencil doodles I did on the very first layer shine through.
• On the right, you can see a bit of a cluster towards the bottom of the page. I love this little section too - I thought this page was a lot of fun to create. There are book pages torn and glued to the background, splatters, Prismacolor NuPastels (which I recently rediscovered in my stash and am enjoying experimenting with again), and more. 
• The quote reads "You cannot change the circumstances, the seasons, or the wind, but you can change yourself."

The photos above really just depict closer views of the above photographs, so the descriptions are the same. That doesn't change the fact that I love them!

One last thing before I go. I have a Facebook page where I've been sharing a lot of what I do here, but I feel like a Facebook group has so much more potential than that. So here's my question - do any of you have anything that you love to see? Maybe prompts, discussion questions, or anything along that vein that you'd like to participate in? Because I honestly think it could be a lot of fun.

At any rate, I hope you all enjoyed this post and I'm looking forward to hearing from you!

Connections (8.7.2016)

I'm not sure if you can really tell from the photos, but the piece this post is about was done on a canvas. It's the first canvas I've done in a good long while, and I absolutely adore the way it turned out. The layers, the colors, the message - I feel like I've created something I'm proud to call my own and that's a good feeling.

As far as the message is concerned, it's a sort of companion piece to a poem I wrote for my Patreon page. If you look under the "Why Immensum is on Patreon" tab, the bits that are in bold are part of  poem I created to describe my journey. After I had done the mixed media layering of this canvas and was trying to think on what words would fit the feeling of the piece, this phrase is the one that immediately came to mind.

There are far too many layers for me to fully explain all of them, but I'll do my best.

• The first thing that stands out to me, because it is clearly the focus of the page, is the giant pink heart. That design was actually created via a stencil I made a good while back on a simple piece of printer paper. It was never intended to be used for long term use, but it was made during a period of time when I was experimenting with hearts as a significant theme in my work. I still like the idea of that.
• The stenciled letters in the upper right hand and lower left hand corners of this canvas are indeed the same stencil as the word 'heart' in the title. For the title word, I applied multiple layers of the while paint in order to make sure it stood out against all the layers of the background and didn't blend into it too much.
• Speaking of the corners, the lower right hand corner is probably one of my favorite parts of this canvas. You can see that there is a lot of texture, which was created by dabbing on white acrylic paint with a paper towel. There are also a few bits of book paper, layered with some stamping, some watercolors, and a bit of masking tape.

• In this photo, you can see the details of the title a bit better. I simply used a gel pen to outline the letters of the title, doing it several times for emphasis. The rest of the words were stamped.
• You can also see in these photos how a bit of the heart has been lifted away. That effect was achieved when the piece got wet, due to an attempt to make some vague drip marks. However, I then proceeded to place a sheet of paper down on the canvas and pull it back up (a technique that you may have seen in the video from my last post. I love the effect that I ultimately got.

As you can probably tell, I sort of love this canvas. It has a bit of personal meaning to me, but I also think that visually it is incredible important. It defines a specific point in my artistic journey, the point where I truly decided that I wanted to try to make art for a living, at least in some capacity.

Also, from the creation of this canvas, I was able to come up with several other ideas of things I would like to try to create in the future - a potential digital drawing inspired by some of my favorite parts of this canvas. But that's the funny thing about art - you always come up with the best ideas when you're creating something else. Thank you all so much for joining me, and I'll see you next time!

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!

Creativity Will Work Itself Out (8.1.2016)

It's been a few days, and I'm back with a couple more pages out of my new art journal!

I've been playing around with a bunch of old techniques I'm just now remembering from all my time away from mixed media, and it's coming back to me, slowly but surely. Although I do like the way this page turned, out, there's still something about it that just feels vaguely unfinished to me. I can't quite figure it out though - I can always come back to it if I figure it out at a later date.

The bit of washi tape you see up close in the right hand photo (with the big arrow pointing to it) actually inspired the color palette of this page. I knew that I wanted to use that piece in particular, and so I took special care to make sure I included it. Eventually, I ended up whiting out all but the word "Relaxation!" and that became the title of my page.

Going back to the left hand photo, you can see the texture I got from the collage base of my page - before doing anything, I created a collage of paper scraps for texture. Maybe I'll go back and outline a few of them.

I absolutely adore this page.

Other than that, I'm not sure just what else to say about it. The colors are perfect for what I was trying to achieve, the title was a style I had never really done before, and hearts have always been a sort of signature of mine. I'm also attracted to the dark ink outlines of the shapes.

Between the restart point of my mixed media and now, this might be my favorite finished page.

Here you can see some of my favorite little details of the page. As you can see, I did some white dots on the teal colored title, which was a technique I had experimented with here and loved the way it turned out. You can also see the texture created from the piece of punched paper I collaged down, all the layers of paint, the way the ink on the hearts smeared a little (but in an appealing way), and the outlines on all of the little white polka dots (which I did with the eraser of a pencil and some white paint).

Every bit of this page turned out exactly the way I wanted it to, and a lot of it was much better than expected.

These are some other areas of color and texture that I enjoyed.

• In the left hand photo, I love the colors that were obtained with the blues and pinks and lime greens of the heart. Of the four hearts, the coloring on this one is my favorite. I also love the way the ink smeared, I think it gives it some character.
• On the right, I think my favorite part is through the yellow, where some of the doodling I did (just with a standard pencil) shows through. The way the dots behind the title compliment it is also a plus.

This page says a lot to me about the way that creativity works. Sometimes you'll go through rough patches and you'll make things that you aren't a big fan of. A couple of things I've been messing with recently have been like that recently. But, if you keep working, it'll all work out in the end.

Thanks for being here, and I'll see you all next time!

The Struggle (7.28.2016)

The title of this page is a direct reference to the making of it.

This was a work and progress over a series of days, and it fought me every step of the way. I'm still not completely happy with the way it turned out, but I decided to call it done. I also heavily considered not sharing it at all, but there are a few small bits that stood out to me as being nice, and I also wanted to show that everyone struggles sometimes.

However, even with the chaos  of the page, there are a few parts that I do like. That's what I keep trying to focus on, and it has helped significantly.

• First and foremost, on the left, you can see the section on the bottom, where a bit of collage work, green and blue paint, and doodles done in pen show through. As I was proceeding through the layers that followed, I took special care to keep this section intact.
• On the right, you can see a bit where I did some stitching with thread. Also in this photo you can see multiple layers of paint, stenciling, stamping and collage. As you can see, I was struggling to find something that worked. If this photograph alone was the entire piece, I would be incredibly happy with it.

In the end, we all struggle. Sometimes there's nothing we can do to avoid it, and everything seems to be working against us. The best we can do is push through and focus on the good things. I hope you all got something out of this, and I'll talk to you soon.