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.

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!