A Few Art Journal Pages

 Just sharing a little playtime fun. I just was having a hard time with another project and needed an escape from what wasn't working.

Enjoy the photos!

As you can see, I was trying to use up scraps that have been sitting around on my table for far too long. I'm also working on a post that shows what I've done with a lot of my card-making paper scraps. Coming soon.

Happy Spring!

-Wy

Color Palette Journal: Spring Tones

 I'm back playing in the Color Palette Journal!

This palette seems familiar and I think I may have done it before...or one that is very similar. In flipping through my journal, I see that my panda page used the same colors basically. But I don't mind.

So here's the current palette:

Called Spring Tones, I like the cool blue-greens and the pure pinks. A touch of gray never hurt.

So here's what I did with it.

I've been doing a lot of scenes lately and decided to stick with that as I enjoy doing them. I've also wanted to do some birds like I've seen in Amber K. Creative youtube videos.

I also got a new background stamp of birch trees. I've been wanting a stamp like this because I have a stencil of birch trees that I love. The problem is that I want the stencil to be in the reverse; in essence a stamp image. This one is pretty dang close.

I like how it came out and it satisfied a lot of art cravings this time.

I'll be doing my random draw from my Color Palette Pinterest board soon for my next spread! I'm kinda hoping for bright colors this time!

Stay safe.

-Wy

Annabel Lee: Edgar Allan Poe Series

 Last year, I brainstormed a bunch of ideas for the works of Edgar Allan Poe. I hashed through a few of them so I'd have a starting point if I got behind the 8-ball come October. Guess what? Behind the 8-ball!

Out of the three ideas I started, I chose the poem, "Annabel Lee". I felt that I would be able to work this into the "collection" with relative ease. I had been trying to keep my works within a certain color way and I had not yet done blue. The references in this poem to the sea inspired me that way.

While the year 2020 certainly lent itself to be the year of the "Red Death", I didn't have that one fleshed out enough to get it done for October. But I may work on it now that my Halloween projects are completed and I am not yet inspired for Christmas. 

Here's what I made:

If you recall, I do have a few parameters that I try to meet in each of these canvases in order to keep them somewhat cohesive. They all must display the title, they all must have a picture of Poe, they all must have a torn paper background (mostly). I try to keep it looking rather "vintage" but that's a loose rule.

The poem inspired certain elements; the tomb that opens into the sea, the moon, and the bride. 

I like how "the tomb" seems to be a doorway into a new realm and how the eye is drawn into it.

This canvas is complete enough for me to make a digital file of it. But I do intend to add more 3-D elements to it, specifically small seashells along the very bottom. Since those would not scan very well, I have left them off until I have a good digital rendering. 

This makes the 6th piece in the Poe collection. (I may be ready to do a set of notecards.) The others in this series can also be seen here on the blog in various October posts or search by label "Edgar Allan Poe". They are, in order of completion; The Raven, The Black Cat, The Tell-Tale Heart, Morella, The Haunted Palace, and now, Annabel Lee.

Have a very Happy Halloween and Stay Safe! Today of all days is the time to Wear a Mask!

-Wy

Halloween Art Journal: Part 2

 As promised, it's part 2 of the Halloween Journal. Still black Dylusions square journal. Lot's of paint and collage.

Here we go...

Happy Haunting: I always try to sort my stash before I purchase anything new. This page came out of that sort. But it didn't stop me from buying new stuff this year. LOL.

Haunted Honeymoon:  Another page from the "stash". These scraps of paper from the Abandoned collection (Tim Holtz) were leftovers from the vignette boxes I was making. These little rectangles reminded me of vintage luggage or trunks. 

Fall Array:  I like to take my scraps of paper and stick them to a larger piece of paper then cut shapes out of them. These large shapes are done that way. I have stencils from way back, (the time before stencils were cool and people only used them on walls and furniture. True story.) After I created the "motherboard" paper (from the scraps), I traced the stencil and cut the shapes out.

BTW, I put all these large shapes on this spread because I didn't really like the background I had. I was experimenting with gold paint. While it worked well, I couldn't figure out what to do with it. So I covered it all up, mostly. (pro tip)

A Good Night's Work:  I had a starry background, old book paper, and a mop-up sheet of glossy cardstock that was silvery gray. I channeled those neon colors and made my bats really stand out. (Again with the ancient stencil!) 

Hope you're getting your Halloween on however you can this year!

Don't forget if you need any Halloween wall art, I've got original artwork/collage for sale in my Etsy shop. 

-Wy

Halloween Art Journal: Part 1

 In all fairness, I can't remember if I've shared some of these before or not, so this part contains pages that are older and not fresh in my mind. So that means...picture post!

This is a black square Dylusions journal that measures 8 X 8, I think. I've been working in this on and off for about 3 years now and I've pretty much dedicated it to be my Halloween themed journal. (Though some of the first pages I made are not, I was more or less experimenting with the substrate to see what would stick, literally.) I use paints and collage a lot in this journal. I can't say I'm a fan of this size or shape but I am determined to finish this journal in the Halloween theme. Not this year...oh no...I don't foresee any completed goals for this year.

Here's the first set of pages. 

Trick or Treat Abstract: I had scraps of paper in Halloween colors. I had leftover paint to splatter. That is all.

High School Lab:  This 2 page spread was meant just to preserve some of my favorite paper. The Laboratory collection from Tim Holtz a few years back was so hard to find and one of my very favorite Halloween paper collections he put out.

Nightshade Garden:  I had a collage sheet with imagery from Joggles.com. The background has a lot of interference paint (a paint that shifts color or shows better under certain lighting conditions). I really like the spiders in this spread. They remind me of the spider from The Corpse Bride.

 Green Halloween:  Another "using up the stash" page. 

Update on my Halloween projects: 

1. I am in the midst of doing my annual Edgar Allan Poe collage so I hope to share that by Halloween.

2. My inktober drawings may still happen but it's not looking good so I've put it on the back burner.

3. I completed another assemblage piece that I can't wait to share. (Yup, it lights up!)

4. I'm having a lot of fun using up some scraps in my art journal so I may have a Part 3 to this post as well!

Have a great week!

Wear your mask, social distance, wash your hands! Go VOTE and get a flu shot. (That's more of a reminder for me. *clears throat*)

-Wy

Back into the Art Journal

 I usually get a bit behind on blogging in the summer. Every year I think it'll be different but it never is. 

So here I am back at it, finally. I finished some pages in my large Art Journal; the one I thought I would have finished by now. Well, as of today, I only have 2 pages left. Wonder how long those 2 pages will take me.

Here's a look at them without too much explanation. Just enjoy the view.

Trying to get back into it, I just went with a color combo that was unexpected. It matches the image better than the photo displays. Just throwing some stuff around to get into the groove.

Went back to the magazine cut-outs that I have hoarded over the years. Tried to fill a page rather than get too creative with it. 

You can see the little touches of pink in the background that connected these cut-out birds to the page. I went "Dylusional" on this page. 

I had these stringy green wavy things in my scraps hoard. I may have been holding them for flower stems but they looked so good on this background. I was thinking another underwater/mermaid scene when I found the Great White. And as providence would have it, Discovery Channel's Shark Week began this week!

The background was nothing special so I covered it all up, mostly. I just loved the image, the little story, and I used up old alphabet stickers for the frame around the edge. 

These pages are not super creative but they do preserve some of the stuff in my stash. Stuff that I don't like to use because it's too pretty or I like it just the way it is. It isn't gonna get seen in my file folders! It will get seen on an art journal page no matter how much "art" I add to it.

So today I have learned that my art journal needs to hold the things I like and want to keep and look at again. It doesn't have to come from a blank page every time.

Stay well. Create much.

-Wy

Global Pandemic: Day 16

Nice day today.
I got a great start on my Dyalog. I've decided to try to use stuff from my hoard that has been kicking around for a while. When I abandoned my craft space in the basement last Fall, I left a lot of my art journaling supplies down there, like paints, and spray inks. I haven't opened a jar of Dylusions paint since November last year. So I wasn't too surprised to find some of it was dried up or unusable. But I found enough that is good and that's what I'm using.

I know I have to clean out that space before I'll ever use it again. I have to pull out every item, every piece of furniture, every single piece and organize, sort, and decide whether it stays or goes. It's a huge project. I literally want to remove everything from the room so that I can clean the carpet or remove it or something. (Let's just say, I've got to do something with it as it's beginning to smell a bit like cat piss.)

That means, it's a HUGE project. Not just sorting through my stash. It's a whole shifting of stuff.

But hey, what else have I got to do?

Anyway, I took a few photos of a few pages that I've got started in the Dyalog. I'm using a dot grid and it was the only one I had that wasn't started with something. I knew it was meant for great things!

 I'm going to add a few notes just for my personal interest, and in case I need to remember what I used. I'm trying to use up the 4 bottles of Distress Paint I have.
So my warm colorway is: Abandoned Coral (Distress), Fossilized Amber (Distress), and Vanilla Custard (Dylusions).
My cool colorway is: Lucky Clover (Distress), Mermaid Lagoon (Distress), and Mushy Peas (Dylusions).
I used mainly a palette knife to apply the paint so that it would dry relatively quickly as I don't have a gelli plate or brayer. This is a bit new for me; my pages have a lot of white space left on them. I don't usually do that. I like to have a base color(s) but because I needed them to dry quickly (my heat tool wasn't at the ready), I decided to give this a go. I figure if I get too stuck on it, I can always spray it with inks later.
I used mostly smaller stencils, a variety from my stash for various companies.
Three single pages, I coated with black paint. I did stencil a bit on one of them.

I haven't gotten to the frames or the calendar part yet but I'll try that tomorrow.

See? Just get a start. The rest will come about day by day.
Stay well and STAY HOME!
-Wy