Balzer Designs

Art Journal Every Day: Collage Quickie

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.  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, use the hashtag #artjournaleveryday so that we can all take a peek.  Even if you're not on social media, you can see everything (from twitter, pinterest, instagram, and facebook) that uses that hashtag here. 

I haven't shared any art journal pages since December!  But I have still been art journaling regularly.  Not every day, but most days.  Today I thought I'd share a peek at a favorite technique.  I love to use collage in my art journal.  It's quick and easy and the results always make me happy.  One of my favorite collage techniques is to create shapes.  You can see a quick peek at the process in this video:

I use very simple supplies:

• a permanent black marker
• a hotel room key
• painted deli paper
  
  • FYI: I have an extremely limited number of painted paper scrap packs in my shop at the moment.
• Matte Medium
• scissors

And here are the results:

As you can see, there's lots of empty space on the page for me to add my daily journaling.

You can see a bit of an earlier page peeking through in the upper left corner.  Because I bind my own journals from the leftover paper junque in my studio, I have lots of oddly shaped pages in my art journal.

It's tempting to toss away the painted papers that aren't "pretty enough."  However, I have found that using them in collage is the key to happiness.  If your papers are beautiful, you'll hate cutting them up.  If they're kind of okay, then you have no problem hacking into them!! And the sum truly is greater than the parts!

I'm planning to start sharing art journal pages again going forward.  I hope you're looking forward to it!

Thanks for stopping by!

Nature Printing with Gifted Leaves

While I was teaching at The Ink Pad, one of my students kindly gifted me with some leaves from her garden. 

I took them home and had a great time printing until the leaves started to fall apart (and for a little while after they fell apart too)!  You can see a 30-second video of the printing process below:

And here are the prints:

Some of these are ready for a frame (especially that first one) and others will make for lovely backgrounds and collage papers.  This experience did make me long for unique leaves beyond the heavily available oak and maple leaves in my neighborhood.  That's what I've always used before for nature prints and they're nice, but feel so basic to me.  So...if you spy someone sneaking around your garden picking leaves up off the ground, it's probably me!  ;)

Thanks for stopping by!

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To learn more about how I gelatin print, check out my online class on the subject.

Happy Fourth of July

Happy Independence Day!  I'm spending the day at the beach with my family. 

(This is a spread in my Gelli Journal.)

Hope you're finding a way to enjoy your Fourth!

Thanks for stopping by!

June YouTube Members Livestream Recap

Sue left a lovely comment about June's livestream for YouTube Channel members on yesterday's blog post and I wanted to share it:

"Just an aside: loved the live stream the other day. I blocked it out time-wise and nobody in the house dared to interrupt while I was watching. It was really fun. Steve was so nice and welcoming...you’re a great team. Looking forward to the next one. I’ll be trying to think of some questions for you....you can talk about so many different subjects...it’s super!"

This livestream was packed with techniques and ideas and so I thought I'd share a bit about what we covered in our hour together:

I did a demo on drawing faces -- both pleasing and absurd:

These weird pieces of paper are the remnants from a bookbinding demo:

There was lots of talk about where to find inspiration for stencils and paper cuts and then I demonstrated cutting out a stencil by hand:

There was even a demo of how I do fabric collage:

We also covered the equipment I use to film videos as well as a quick ScanNCut tutorial!  Whew.  It was a power packed hour of art making.

Past livestreams (like this one) are available to members as soon as they join.  You also get access to community posts where you can leave your questions and/or requests for demos each month.  It's just $4.99 -- the price of a fancy drink from Starbucks -- per month.

Thanks for stopping by!

Floral Printed Fabric

So you may recall that I carved a block only to discover it had a flaw:

After much thought, I decided to ignore the flaw and just love the stamp.  So, I took it for a printing test drive!  Here's a video of the printing process:

You can see that I printed on top of a white commercial fabric that has white polka dots.  I like experimenting with print-on-print. I was also vaguely thinking that once the ink dries I might try overdyeing the fabric to see if the polka dots resist the dye...!

Here's a peek at the printed fabric drying:

To print on fabric I use block printing ink for fabric and a soft printing surface.  The ink takes 24-48 to dry depending on the climate you live in.  Otherwise, it's the same as printing on paper!

Here's the fabric:

I love how it turned out and I don't think that you see the flaw at all.  I’m excited to experiment with different colors of ink and maybe print the block on the diagonal?  And we will have to see about that overdyeing too!

Thanks for stopping by!