Stencilage Journal Pages

I've been having a lot of fun playing with stencils.  They are especially fun to use with some of the sprays out now - Glimmer Mists and Color Washes are a couple.  Stencils are also fun to play with with spouncers or foam brushes and paint or ink.

My very talented friend, Paula, aka Journal Artista, is hosting a contest and will be giving away some Crafter Workshop stencils.  To be eligible to be in the drawing for a stencil you need to make some art using a stencil and share a link to it on her blog Linky.  You can read all about it on her blog HERE.

Back to the fun I've been having...here's a page I finished today:

The background is all craft acrylic paints,  The design in the upper left corner and lower right corner were made with a Tattered Angels stencil.  I kinda grunged them up with some extra paint and Color Wash spray.  Decorated the background with dots made with pencil eraser, circle made with rx bottle and some stenciled flowers with a stencil I made with the Tim Holtz Alterations Tattered Florals die.  I never completely plan my journal pages, kinda let them evolve as I go.  And this time I had some die cut flowers laying around on my art table, as well as a couple scraps of colorful watercolor paper.  I liked how the bright colors looked with the dark blue so played around with placement and glued stuff down with matte medium.  Looked through a list I keep of words and quotes to use in my journal someday and decided "If not now, when?" was a good choice.

Guess maybe I use prompts backwards...most people pick a prompt, then do the art.  I sometimes know what I want to say on the page, but usually I do the art and then decide what it's saying to me.

I'm really liking that Tattered Florals die.  Here's some more stenciling with it:

And still more:

These both came about with what us Journal Artista Ustream friends call Paulaisms.  "Use what is around you on your art table".  Probably not her exact words but close.

For the gold and blue page I was painting book pages with watercolors and then die cutting the flowers.  After cutting out the yellow ones I set the leftover paper aside and it was on top of the book page I had painted blue.  Looked pretty cool!  So an idea was born!  I painted the gold background, glued the blue page down, then the yellow.  Looked sort of plain so added some cut out flowers.  Still needed something so used some of the die scrap as stencils abd sprayed with bright blue spray I made by mixing Glacier Glimmer Mist with some bright blue Memories reinker ink.  

I used matte medium for gluing down all the pieces on these pages.

The green page started out as a background page I was going to post to show the stencils.  In addition to the flowers I also used sequin waste (or also called Punchinella) to stencil the dots.  I did that first, then put the flowers down and sprayed over them with Color Wash.  (fyi - I get my sequin waste HERE)  I love sequin waste and use it all the time.
Here's the background page:

   I got a magazine in the mail today and saw an ad with those ribbon flowers (do you all look through magazines thinking "I could use that in an art project!"?  sometimes the ads catch my attention more than the rest of the magazine).  Right away I was trying to think what to do with those and thought the bright colors would be great on that green background.  So while watching the Artistic Bikers Thursday Ustream from the fabulous Oasis Studio I fussy cut the flowers.  And Blade was talking about summertime and things that represent summer so I thought summertime would be the perfect title for this page.  I've been wanting to see how ledger paper would feed through my printer so once I got the text how I wanted it I printed a page out of an old ledger book I got off ebay for 99 cents awhile back.  Worked out great and I'm really happy with the page.
You can get links to The Artistic Biker Ustream and YouTube from his blog HERE.

And if you want to see more stencil art,  check out a page I did a little while ago - Click Here
This page was definately Paula inspired with the many layers added to it!

Thanks Paula and Blade for all the inspiration I get from both of you!

If you read all the way through to here I applaud you.  If not, I understand, it got pretty long.  Hope you enjoyed the pictures!

Owl

Owls are just about my fav animal and bird.  I think they are beautiful and fascinating to watch.  I've been watching a couple families of Barn Owls on UStream the last few months.  From eggs hatching to the young owls fledging.  Really fun to watch (except when they tear a little critter apart to eat...I know it's part of their reality but I chose not to watch those parts!).
Inspired by those beautiful owls, and a desire to play with my new watercolor pencils I drew this owl:

I drew it on a card of smooth Fabriano paper.  I had a page in my bird altered book that already had the copper and platinum background paper on it.  Sometimes when I can't come up with an idea or am not feeling very creative I just play around with backgrounds in a journal or altered book.  Then the background is all ready when something comes along needing a page - as in this case.  I adhered the owl drawing to the background with triangle shaped dark copper brads.

Thanks for taking a look!

Enjoy the rest of your weekend!

Color Inspiration and Grids

I'm working on an altered book with the theme Color Inspiration.  I'll use it to help me out when I'm stuck for ideas or need to check out colors or color combinations.  Color inspires alot of my art ideas - I'll see what I think at that moment is the perfect color and will be stuck with it in my head - I'll have to create something using that color to release it from my head!

This month is Michelle Wards' GPP Street Team Crusade No. 41 and the challenge is Grid Lock.  You can check it out here.

Here are some pages I did recently in my Color Inspiration AB using grid layouts:

For this page I masked out the squares then painted the page with black acrylic paint.  When I removed my masks the text showed through.  I really like to leave some text showing in an altered book when I can.  I like the way it looks.  I then stamped the puffin rubber stamp in each square and hand colored the beaks.  I love the contrast of the black and white on this page.

This page is photographs I took at an Oregon State Park called Thompsons Mills.  It's an old flour mill and I was fascinated by the rusty gears and parts I found.  I took alot of photos so may definately have another rust page for this altered book.  I thought the specks of paint and the haphazard stamping of "RUST" sort of fit with the subject matter of rust. 

The facing page to this one follows and has a rust background.  In addition to looking at this page to see the dif shades of rust it also gives me ideas for combining colors like rust and turquoise.  I love the way they look together.  Although I would say the turquoise background does enhance the rust more than the rust background enhances the turquoise. 

This was a page in a magazine.  As soon as I saw it and the "Tranquil Turquoise" I knew it was destined for my color book.  And since I had already decided to do the rust page with a turquoise background this seemed like the perfect stuff for the facing page.  It was alot of fun to cut up the pieces and figure out how to arrange them.  Just cutting out squares all the same size was just not going to work for this grid!

Thanks Michelle for the Crusade idea.  I'm really enjoying working with grids!

Inspiration

Lot's of different things inspire my art - nature is a big inspiration, colors also spark many ideas.  Something I like to use for inspiration is song lyrics.

I just completed a journal page inspired by the Shinedown song - The Crow & The Butterfly. (lyrics can be found here)

The background is acrylics.  I turned the journal on it's side and put the colors of Golden Fluid Acrylics along the binding and sprayed it with water and let them run down.  Once dry I wrote the lyrics with a white pen.  The crow I drew and cut out of black paper and glued on.  The butterfly is a rubber stamp (that I recently got out of the $1 bin at Michaels-pretty nice, huh?).  The title I printed on ledger paper and cut out (ledger paper is sort of a unifying theme in this journal.  It's along the bound edge of all pages and used somewhere in most of the pages).  The dandelion at the top I painted over the top with golden acrylics.  I'm really happy with how it turned out.  I love the bright colors in the background, and the white writing, and the bird, and well, I guess I like it all!  I enjoy the song too...I'm sure you can find it on YouTube if you want to give a listen.

Here's some tags I created in the past using song lyrics for inspiration:

  

Think about some of your favorite songs or lyrics, look up the lyrics online if you aren't sure of what all they say.  What does it make you think about?  How can you use that as inpiration for an art project?

It's alot of fun to think about! 

What else inspires you?  I'm always interested to hear about inspiration...

new book

I'm a book junkie so, of course, my family gave me books as birthday gifts earlier this month.
One of my choices was Collage Lab by Bee Shay.
It is full of ideas to spark your creativity as well as expand your knowledge.  It has 52 experiments.
They're divided into 12 sections:  Building the Foundation, Texture, Gesso, Color, Surface Design, Line and Form, Papers, Paper Play, Mediums, Imagery, Visual Dictionary, and Unification and Composition.
Each one has a Learning Objective, Materials List, Instructions, Play and Experiment ideas, and Food For Thought for when you are done.
Complete with photos to help inspire even more creativity.
So far I'm just working through some Basic Gesso Surfaces but have paged through the whole book and I'm in for lots of fun!
So - I'd recommend getting your papers and acrylics and gesso out and taking a look at this book and see how many ideas you can come up with!  I think whether you are a beginner or experienced you would enjoy this book - it'll generate ideas I'm sure!
I know I'm going to come up with lots!  I'll share them with you here as I go!

Color inspiration

I love color - all colors - some alot more than others. Green is my fav color. But I really do love anything that is colorful. I am especially intrigued by the names of colors and love to read them whenever I get the chance. I think it's fun to check out the names of colors of paint samples while at the home improvement store. Paint companies get pretty creative when they name colors!

A couple years ago...yes it's been years...I made a color themed book for a swap and had to send it off to my swap partner. I've had the idea to do my own color journal or altered book ever since and have even saved some images here and there for potential color pages. Well I finally started on my color themed altered book yesterday! I'll share a post with you of the page I did as soon as it's completed.

In the meantime, here's the mini book I originally made that has had me thinking about color themed art all these years.

The front cover and the back cover are images I cut out of catalogs. The rest of the images are photographs I took.

Oh, and feel free to share any names of colors you can think of that might interest me!

Enjoy!