Art Journal 01.31.12 — Free

This page was inspired by a few things. First of all, the background was created so I could mess up my hands for this photo.

You can see the patterns in the paint on my hands on the page, even though I brushed over it, smearing all of the various textures together.

See the blue areas to the right and along the bottom? You can see that pattern in white on my hands. That's from sequin waste, also called punchinella.

Another influence is a canvas my niece painted for me for Christmas 2 years ago.

It's one of my most treasured possessions. I was so touched that she painted it for me and love how strong and bold it is. Just like my niece, actually!

The other influence on this page is the art of Alisa Burke. She's wonderful and I hope to take at least one of her online classes very soon.

I love the "stained glass" effect that happened when I added the wax pastels in the petals. Wasn't intentional, but I think it's very cool.



For the flower, I wasn't sure how I was going to handle "coloring" it, but I went with the pastels because they'd be transparent. I kept looking at the strong black outline and thinking I needed to add to that, doodle a bit and then add the white for some contrast. I'm really happy with how it turned out.



Mediums Used:
acrylic paint, various colors
water soluble wax pastels
ink

Other Materials:
punchinella
bubble wrap
shelf liner
paint brushes in various sizes (bottoms used to make the white dots)

Making a Mess

Sometimes winging it means making a mess. Eh, it happens. I wanted to play with modeling paste and a sketch I'd scribbled out months ago, so I did. And it got ugly. I tried to cover things up, add, drip, shade, but it just never came together.


Getting started. See my sketch reference to the left. That cardboard ring is from a roll of stickers from work. I used it as the template for the face. I used the green circle thingy as a stencil for the modeling paste.


I used my water soluble wax pastels to color in the face and hair.


You can kind of see where I'd randomly placed some masking tape before I gessoed over the top.


Modeling paste applied. Not loving it at this point... and it all went down hill from there...



Sometimes you just end up with a mess. And have a lot of fun doing it! Sure, there was some frustration, but mostly I just laughed about it. Enjoy the process, learn, move on. YAY, ART!

Inspiration can come from anywhere

This stack of leftover paper and stapler are just sitting on the counter at work. Last week, I looked at it and thought something like, "I love the way that red pops off the greenish yellow. I'm going to use those colors!" Actually, the thought was less proper sentence structure and more like random words "Colors, wow, like, idea, art journal. YES! Ooooh!" all strung together in one "A HA" kind of moment.

Inspired by the colors from the paper above as well as reminders from other artists to give ourselves permission to make mistakes, have fun and enjoy the process.

I love those moments, those flashes of "A HA". Inspiration can come from anywhere at any time. I try to scribble something down when that happens, but this was burned in my head.  Still, I wanted to take the picture today as a reminder to myself and anyone reading that anything can trigger inspiration.

So tell me, what was the last thing that made you go, "A HA!"?

Here We Go

Or, here *I* go, at any rate. (I hope you enjoy coming along with me.) I thought I would start this blog to document my art and things related because I didn't want to bore the pants of my Something Shiny readers. They're kind enough to read my other babbling, I figured a new spot to babble about art was in order.

Part of being brave for me is actually getting my art out, sharing it, being brave enough to declare, "I'm an artist" when it sounds laughable to me even now, even in the face of trying to BE BRAVE. But that's who I am, or at least part of who I am. If you found me from Something Shiny, you know that I like to create things — cakes, cookies, cupcakes, the random craft or how-to. Creating is in my blood. I can't help myself. I'm also a bit of a fickle creative type. I like doing ALL sorts of artsy-fartsy things, so it's a mixed bag with me. We'll see where it takes me, one tentatively brave little step at a time.