Balzer Designs

Art Journal Every Day: Spray Play

If you're new to Art Journal Every Day, there is a short introduction here.  All of the previous posts can be found archived here.  There is a flickr group for sharing right here.  Remember, it's just ten minutes of nourishing your creative self every day!  No need to finish anything or even like it.  If you've done some art journaling this week and you've blogged about it, or put it on flickr, please leave a link in the linky list at the end of this post.  Thanks!

I'm currently obsessed with the Liquitex Spray Paints thanks to my friend Ronda, who introduced me to their awesomeness.  Even though they're low odor, it's a good idea to spray in a well ventilated area and/or use a respirator.  Here I am in mine:

Super glam, right?

In any case, I've been spraying my brains out and having a ball following the learning curve.  Here are a few pages from my art journal that I've sprayed in preparation for journaling later:

Remember the Thermofax prints I shared on Wednesday?  I shared this page:

The white that you see is spray paint!  

I also took one of the faces from Wednesday's post that I had screenprinted onto Deli Paper and glued it into my journal.  Then I went crazy with the spray paints and stencils!

This is the only process shot I took and it's not a very good photo:

I was letting the spray paint drip down.  And here is the finished spread:

I really love how it turned out!  Definitely going to keep playing with spray paint!  The only problem is now I need want more colors!

Here is this week's linky list:

Thanks for stopping by!

Liquitex Spray Paints 12x12 Corn Flower Stencil 12x12 Tiny Circles Stencil 12x12 Aztec Stencil Hero Arts Definition Stamp Wheel of Dots Archival Ink Pad: Black Deli Paper Liquitex Matte Medium Liquitex Basics Acrylic Paint Princeton Catalyst Brushes 12x12 Cityscape stencil Blick Studio Acrylics Spray Bottle for Water Krink K-60 Paint Marker Krink K-71 Permanent Ink Marker 12x12 Scallop Flowers Stencil 12x12 Pattern Leaves Respirator

InLinkz.com

 

Art Journal Every Day: 7 Days in My Journal

If you're new to Art Journal Every Day, there is a short introduction here.  All of the previous posts can be found archived here.  There is a flickr group for sharing right here.  Remember, it's just ten minutes of nourishing your creative self every day!  No need to finish anything or even like it.  If you've done some art journaling this week and you've blogged about it, or put it on flickr, please leave a link in the linky list at the end of this post.  Thanks!

This week I've got a little something different for you.  Starting last Friday, I recorded myself playing in my art journal every day.  Some days I spent a long time.  Some days I spent just a few minutes.  I worked on my pages in stages, as I always do.  Take a peek:

This is the style of art journaling that I teach in my "30 Days in Your Journal" online class.

And here are the pages I worked on in the video:

Hope you enjoyed this peek into my journaling process!

Here is this week's linky list:

Thanks for stopping by!

Art Journal Every Day: 29 Faces Challenge

If you're new to Art Journal Every Day, there is a short introduction here.  All of the previous posts can be found archived here.  There is a flickr group for sharing right here.  Remember, it's just ten minutes of nourishing your creative self every day!  No need to finish anything or even like it.  If you've done some art journaling this week and you've blogged about it, or put it on flickr, please leave a link in the linky list at the end of this post.  Thanks!

Today we have a guest post from Sharon Evans.  I found her blog through the linky list and discovered that she was participating in a really interesting challenge called "29 Faces."  I asked her to share a bit about the experience today.  And, as a side note, if you're interested in faces, check out my DVD: All About Faces.

29 Faces Challenge

I love drawing, painting and doing journal pages centered around faces.  When Julie asked me to do a guest post about the 29 Faces challenge, I was honoured, and then I thought HELP!

However, I love challenges, I need challenges; otherwise I tend to stay in the same place.  I have only been blogging since July last year and in that time my art has come a long way.  The encouragement of other artists has a lot to do with it, but more so are the challenges that I take part in.  The 29 Faces Challenges hosted by Alaya of I love 2 paint are wonderful.

I have always loved doing faces, but had no confidence. The first one I did last September and I really did not know what I let myself in for!  I had total blockage, but decided to do what some others were doing – copying portraits by artists that you liked.  It was a real learning process.  By the next challenge in February, I was better prepared and set myself some goals. Such as getting on top of acrylics, sketches of real people, getting the hang of journaling!  I had never done any journaling till this year.

Here are some of my efforts from the February challenge.

One of the biggest challenges was the goal of getting peoples likenesses.  Whenever I try to paint real people it comes out wrong.  So I decided to draw from some photos, and hey presto it worked 90 percent of the time.  So the next step was to try and paint them, well um, that will have to be my challenge for the next 29 faces in September!  However, I have a mild success if I keep the portrait sketchy.

The following steps are from a journal page I did from a photo of my sister’s granddaughter Kendal.

The background was painted all over the page with acrylics, and I painted the facial area with white gesso.  I wanted to use watercolours and I find that my journal paper soaks it up like blotting paper!  Also I like how the watercolour slides about on gesso.

I sketched in Kendal, and then started to make marks on the background, with some homemade stamps.

I added some horses, as Kendal and her mother are horse mad. Then I added the text which I painted in with gesso, and then coloured with gouache. I like to keep some of the white showing as it helps the text to stand out.

This is a fairly simple piece for me, as I usually put more texture in my work. This one below, I did for the Fall, Fearless and Fly challenge at Artists in Blogland.

I love texture, and like to create it with lots of scribbling, dripping wool into paint and dropping it onto the page and lifting it to see what mark it makes.  I use a white gel pen a lot and even a tippex pen.  Anything goes, even a comb!

It pays when doing daily challenges to be able to ring the changes as it can all become a bit too much.  I love using digital media, either drawing or painting directly in a paint programme or scanning some art and manipulating it with other artwork.  Here are some examples of digital journal pages:

With this one I scanned a background I had painted in my journal, then in Photoshop merged a painting I had done in Corel Painter.  Then added more marks and the text.

This page is entirely digital.  The face was done in Painter, and the rest in Photoshop.

This was from a drawing of a face that I did with my left hand.  I often do this when I find that my drawings are starting to look alike!  After scanning I coloured it in and scribbled and made marks etc. in Photoshop.  (I have a tablet and pen that makes drawing and painting easy.)

There are a lot of challenges out there from weekly ones with a prompt to daily one with a theme such as 29 faces.  The important thing is to get out of your comfort zone and challenge yourself.  You don’t know where it will lead, but for sure you will meet lots of likeminded people and your art will benefit.  Mine did!

About Sharon:

I live in the Wairarapa region of New Zealand, a rural area with easy access to Wellington, the capital, so have best of both worlds.

However, I have spent much of my life away from NZ, mostly in Europe.  I have itchy feet, but they seemed to have settled now.  I have always been involved in art, as a hobby or with jobs closely related, i.e. designing tapestries, working for a greeting card company and so on.  It was only when I was involved in a serious car crash 12 years ago that left me disabled, that I started to take my art seriously.  I did a Diploma in Art & Design at a local Polytechnic – three years of bliss!  However, I still shied away from calling myself an artist and went into children illustration, mostly educational for schools etc.  I got tired of that a couple of years ago, not the illustration, but doing what others told you to do.  Also my health deteriorated and I needed to find work that I could do at home.  So, I decided to illustrate my own stories and design web sites for other artists (no e-commerce sites please!) I have been slogging away at that.   Middle of last year, I was designing a site for a photographer I discovered the blogging world.  Here, at long last I was able to explore my artistic side and tentatively call myself an artist!

My blog is Art Inspires.

(Hopefully in the next few weeks I will have my own website up and running.  It will be www.sharonsillustrations.co.nz  Please note it is not there yet.  Try in a month.  I will do a post on it on my blog when I have uploaded it.)

 Here is this week's linky list:

Thanks for stopping by!

Art Journal Every Day: Torn Paper Collage Tutorial

If you're new to Art Journal Every Day, there is a short introduction here.  All of the previous posts can be found archived here.  There is a flickr group for sharing right here.  Remember, it's just ten minutes of nourishing your creative self every day!  No need to finish anything or even like it.  If you've done some art journaling this week and you've blogged about it, or put it on flickr, please leave a link in the linky list at the end of this post.  Thanks!

Today we have a guest post from Oksana Tepp.  I found her blog through the linky list and fell in love with her torn paper tree collages.  I asked her to write up a tutorial and she was kind enough to oblige!  Enjoy! 

Torn Telephone Book Pages
Painted Collage Tutorial

Torn paper collage technique is not a new invention. It is a well known method of using torn bits of variety of papers to fill in shapes, to add texture and color to backgrounds. Torn paper technique is popular in scrapbooking, card making craft, and fine art work.

Today I will share the process of making a painted mixed-media collage for the art journal page using torn telephone book pages for creating whimsical trees, which may look quite realistic on the painted landscape background.

First time I made an art journal page with torn telephone book pages simply as an experiment. I used those papers in my previous art project as a protective cover for my working surface and had different acrylic paints, alcohol inks, and UTEE random marks all over the pages. All acrylic colors are from the balanced color palette I used for one of my paintings. I just didn’t want to discard those papers. Small font, tight rows of printed words, and grayish color of the paper made me think about aspen and birch tree bark. I did not care about non-archival quality of the telephone book pages. My art journal is a junk journal, where I have magazine clippings, newspaper prints, junk mail, old book pages, music sheets, greeting cards, etc. This is the result of my first experimental collage. I did not document the process step-by-step. Background is painted with acrylics on solid dark red cardstock.

Now, after learning some tricks for this method, I will describe in details how to create a painterly looking mixed-media collage for your art journal page.

There are 3 main steps for this type of painted collage:

Step 1. Create your background.

Step 2.  Sketch the layout of the tree/trees and collage the tree shapes, applying torn telephone book pages.

Step 3. Add details, finishing touches.

Step 4 (optional). Cover your finished collage with the sealer, add journaling.

Every step of this process can be done in variety of ways. I will give you demonstration first showing my next art journal page “Vivid Sunshine."

Materials used:

• Red cardstock for the base/page itself (pages in my art journal are about 8in x 10.5in).
• Variety of stamps and stencils for the background.
• Acrylic paints of your choice. For this project Soft Body Liquitex acrylics were used.
• Charcoal for sketching.
• Large and small paint brushes, sponges (for stenciling).
• Painted and clean telephone book pages.
• Liquitex Matte Medium as an adhesive and a sealer.
• Krylon Matte Finish spray as a final sealer.

 Step 1. Background

Random stamps and stencils with acrylic paint are used to add design to the solid red cardstock.

Bright yellow acrylic paint with the larger brush is applied to the top and bottom of the page to define the sky and foreground for the future landscape. Such bright colors of the background create a perfect backdrop for the grayish tree trunks.

Step 2. The Trees

Using pencil, marker, crayon, or charcoal (I used charcoal) sketch roughly the shapes of the trees.

Choose your telephone book pages. Some may be used, unaltered, some painted.

Start tearing your collage paper, making bigger and smaller pieces, depending on the width of the tree trunks and branches. Leave some pieces for later custom tearing for the tight and tiny spots or specific shapes of your tree branches.

Get ready for the fun part: collage itself. Collect all needed tools and materials for this step.

To fill in the shapes of the trees try to follow your sketch lines on both sides (left and right). It’s easier to create the contour of the tree, and fill in the middle part after. If you have painted your collage papers, try to use darker colored bits on the bottom and shaded areas of the trees.

I knew that charcoal will be smeared a little with the matte medium. This effect will work well for the desired look: distant foggy forest area in the background. If you would like to avoid that consequence do not use charcoal for sketching.

Continue filling in the shapes of the trees. You can make as many layers as you want until you satisfied with the collage. Let it dry. Matte Medium dries relatively fast, but the time will depend on the thickness of your collage (you can create a visible dimensional texture) and the conditions of your working space. I left my page to dry for 2 hours.

Step 3. Finishing Touches

After the collage is fully dried, the journal page lays flat again and is ready for the finishing touches. Smaller branches of the trees and distant trees are painted with burnt umber acrylic paint. Highlights are added with white paint (diluted for transparency).

More distant trees, foreground bushes and grasses, and some small details to the tree trunks are added.

I decided to add protective matte finish and sprayed the finished page with Krylon Matte finish. It dried almost instantly.

I really enjoyed the process of creating this painted collage and decided to try using the same technique for bigger art work on different surfaces and with different mediums.

For the painting on canvas, “Long Day is Over,” I have chosen acrylics, so it was almost the same materials and steps used as described above for the art journal page. This time I made sure that collaged papers are well embedded in acrylic medium, which makes the finished painting archival. Here are the steps:

The finished mixed-media painting “Long Day is Over” is 11in x14 in on cotton stretched canvas and is available in my Etsy shop.

Painted Mixed-Media Collage
on Watercolor Background

I would like to show how the torn paper collage technique works on a watercolor background.

First I painted sunset scenery with watercolors as the background on Strathmore 140lb cold press watercolor paper (11in x 15 in).

The trees’ shapes are sketched with graphite pencil and painted with Titan Buff fluid acrylic. This acrylic paint layer will be insulating the watercolor paper from the collage paper.

Liquitex Super Heavy Gel was used as an adhesive and a sealer for collaging. Torn paper is well covered with the acrylic medium, and the archival quality is not an issue anymore.

Details on the tree trunks are added with acrylics.

Finished mixed-media painting “Watching Sunset” is available in my Etsy shop.

One more example of the same torn paper collage technique: mixed-media acrylic painting on cotton panel “Stillness” (11in x 14in).  Torn painted telephone book pages are used for the aspen trees and torn “crackled” paint chips are used for collaging the Ponderosa trees.

This painting is also available in my Etsy shop.

As you see, the torn paper collage is quite a versatile technique and a good creative exercise. It can be used with different materials and mediums. I purposefully focused my tutorial on creating mixed-media collages with the tree images. Any paper bits can be used for this technique.

Art journaling does not require expensive art supplies and more often non-archival materials can be used for the art journal pages.  Collage art is a good way to repurpose otherwise unwanted papers. It’s almost impossible to repeat exactly the same collage twice: every next collage will be different and unique.  

  About Oksana: 

Oksana Tepp was born in Ukraine in 1969, and grew up in Soviet Union time. Finished Pedagogical State University and became a Teacher of Russian Language and Literatures.

In 2003 Oksana moved to USA, worked as an Interpreter and a Russian Language Instructor at EWU (Cheney, WA).

Art and variety of crafts were always a part of daily life for Oksana. During Soviet Union time she was studying art and crafts for 10 years at the secondary school, where advanced art curriculum was provided. Later Oksana continued practicing art and crafts, and she considers herself a self-taught artist. Since 2010 Oksana is a full time mixed-media artist, working from her home art studio.

Oksana is happily married, and she is the Mother of three sons.

• Art blog: Artfully Imperfect 
• Original art is available from my newly opened online Etsy shop: Artfully Imperfect.

Here is this week's linky list:

Art Journal Every Day: Making Her Mark

If you're new to Art Journal Every Day, there is a short introduction here.  All of the previous posts can be found archived here.  There is a flickr group for sharing right here.  Remember, it's just ten minutes of nourishing your creative self every day!  No need to finish anything or even like it.  If you've done some art journaling this week and you've blogged about it, or put it on flickr, please leave a link in the linky list at the end of this post.  Thanks!

Today we have a guest post from Michelle Remy.  I found her blog through the linky list and stumbled onto a post she wrote about making an effort to generate her own imagery for her art journal.  I was fascinated and wanted to know more and I thought that you might too! 

Making My Mark

I remember the surgeon saying “I can’t guarantee you’ll ever do art again.”  After nearly two decades of severe hand problems and six surgeries, it had come down to this and I had a decision to make:  get my right wrist completely fused and take the chance my soul’s work would be impossible to pursue or face a lifetime of deteriorating bones and constant pain. 

In 2007, I chose the fusion surgery and began the long, arduous rehabilitation journey in which I ultimately surpassed everyone’s expectations.  However, as I documented this battle in my journaling, I began to wonder how best to represent myself in my journals.  I found myself struggling with magazine images, frustrated at the amount of time it seemed to take to find something that spoke to me.  I had never amassed a large image stash in the first place and I was constantly haunted by copyright worries.  More importantly, I felt that by using others’ images, I wasn’t representing the “true me.”

Here I had traveled this scary and terrible road and I was using my gift of hand function to wield a glue stick.  It didn’t feel authentic.  So I decided to move away from using others’ images and try and make journal pages using things I had created on my own or tools that could be easily altered to represent my personal style.

There are so many things you can do to generate personal, unique imagery for your journals.  For collage material, I create my own collage sheets as well as make color copies of previous journal pages.  I spend a lot of time at Staples’ copy center!

Whenever possible, I like to feature my own handwriting.

I carve a bonanza of stamps.

I cut my own stencils.

I take pictures of drawings I did…

...or take close-up, detail shots of old journal pages which I then feature in new journal pages.

Photos of places and events around my hometown are great too.

When my hands aren’t feeling up to a bunch of detail work, I spend time in the studio making serendipity papers which get used on my journal pages.

As an inspiring illustrator, I try to include my own doodles and drawings as well.  Just push past the fear and let your imagination take the lead!

In addition, I try and use commercial tools that are not heavily pre-determined.  In other words, I focus my stash-building around generic supplies that support the expression of my personal voice rather than feature a specific copyrighted image drawn by another artist.  Pattern stencils are among my very favorite tools!  (Thank you Julie for some of the best on the market!)  I also adore found object stamps.  I have several boxes around the studio devoted to my collection of mark-making tools!

I still use found images from time to time.  I tend to use images I can heavily embellish and alter, especially classic paintings or copyright-free images from Dover.  Nowadays, a commercial image really has to call to me to find its way into my journals.  For me, it is important that I make my mark, that my hand be visible in all I do.  I fought long and hard for the ability to do so and I feel I am at my most authentic when I honor that journey. 

Here is this week's linky list:

About Michelle:

I am best described as a multi-media artist who lives and works amongst the beautiful redwoods of the extreme Northern California coast.  I have one grown son, one bird, two cats, and at last count, 14 fish.  My most current art passions are illustration and sculpture.  I love creating characters in every medium imaginable!  My biggest dream is to write and illustrate children’s books.  Please come visit my little corner of world at http://lostcoastpost.blogspot.com.