28 Patterns

Hello peeps! Thanks for visiting me here! :)

I started a creative project by Balzer Designs on February 1st, called 28 Patterns. 

See HERE for link to her blog. 

Create a pattern every day for the month of February, hashtag it with #28Patterns, and share on Instagram. I'm having great fun with it. I'm a little behind, as I was busy with my art class, so now I'm catching up. 

So, counting down to the first of February, here are the first half of the patterns I painted, drew, doodled or stamped.

Day 14

Watercolor paper

Winsor and Newton Artists' Water Colours in Opera Rose and Permanent Rose for the painting of circles and hearts with an old paint brush.Staz On black ink applied with a cosmetic sponge through a Memory Box texture stencil for the dots.

A black Stabilo All watercolor pencil and ultra-fine Sharpie marker for the outlining around hearts and circles.

A yummy length of magenta-colored glittered ribbon. 

Day 13

I used my handmade dirty stencil for my template, the round eraser of a pencil as my stamp, Tim Holtz Distress Ink for the stamping, and a Tim Holtz water brush for the outlining of each circle grouping.

___________________________________

Day 12

For pattern No.12, I simply drew different sizes of circles with a drafting circle template, then filled in with various shades of color with Crayola pencil crayons. This is on a lined index card.

__________________________________

Day 11

I used this pattern I made with paper towels and Neocolors2 for my sweater tree. See my previous blog post. :)

_____________________

Day 10

Made a simple pattern using one of my new hand-carved stamps. I masked off the area so I could overlap the flower in places. The mask was simply the flower stamped on a scrap piece of paper, cut out, and placed over top the previous-stamped flower on the canvas where I stamped again. Not sure I explained that correctly...LOL 

______________________________

Day 9

Playing with my newly carved stamps. Neocolor2 background.

_____________________________

Day 8

A doodle for today's pattern. 

_______________________

Day 7

My idea starter was the paper napkin my water jar is sitting on as seen in photo. 

First I roughly drew some diamonds with the black Stabilo All on watercolor paper.

Painted in lines with wet brush. 
Next adding in color shapes to the black ones, filling in each diamond, and adding more diamonds in white areas. 
Alternated the three Neocolors2, filling in all the white areas, sometimes adding more layers of color to the existing areas and blending as well. 
Lastly, I splattered color on top, going with the messy look.

___________

Day 6

Prepared the book page with clear gesso.

Drew a grid with a ruler and a black Stabillo All watercolor pencil.
Used a brush to paint the grid lines, rounding the corners.

Stamped an image into the squares. Clear stamps and clear blocks makes it super easy.
Used different colored watercolor crayons (I used my Neocolors2) to color in the images in rows, and splattered a bit of the paint to make it look a little messy. 

___________________

Day 5

Stamped a grid using a journaling lines clear stamp (yes, I know, my stamp looks awfully stained, but they work nice 😋).

Colored in each square using a water brush filled with Dylusions ink and also different green Neocolors2. To get the colors blending, I used a water brush that is filled with plain water. These are Tim Holtz brushes, and are my favorite so far. 

To clean brush to switch colors, I added more painterly effects to my previously made pattern. 

___________________

Day 4

 I punched out little circles from book paper for my 2015 DLP calendar and it created a dotty pattern. I simply sprayed ink onto my newly made "stencil" onto watercolor paper, then drew in a quick outline and a heart on each circle.

___________________

Day 3

•index card

•Sharpie metallics in gold, silver and copper

•Dylusions ink sprayed on last. 

___________________

 Day 2

•in my altered Reader's Digest book. 

•Sharpie ultra-fine marker

•neon pink marker

•tangle called cruffles from www.tanglepatterns.com 

________________

Day 1

•Index card

•Dylusions ink - Bubblegum Pink and Cherry Pie

•Sharpie Metallic markers - Silver, Bronze and Gold

And there you have it: my first 14 patterns for the #28patterns challenge by Balzer Designs.

Have a great day!

Yarn Bombing , the Ents and Lots of Gesso

Week 5 of The Documented Life Project 2015 - The Journal. 

See here for more information. Art to the 5th Academy

January Theme
The Blank Page and How to Face It!
January 31
Art Challenge:  Under Paper (paper on your work table that gets all inky while you work)
Journal Prompt:  What Lies Beneath?

A sweater (yarn bombed) tree, layers and layers to cover mistakes, a quote from J.R.R. Tolkien, and just plain fun.

I combined several things with Week 5 of the Documented Life Project challenge.
Pictured is one of my yarn bombed tree on our property.
I have been meaning to create some art of my trees, and now I had the perfect chance! I am taking Junelle Jacobson's online class called Saturday Mornings 2: Love and Whimsy. The first project was to decorate wooden blocks with these adorable sweater trees. For now, I'll be content with this page in my art journal instead of on a block. 

So....

Layering...

I forgot to take pictures of my process of the VERY BEGINNING. Above photo already has quite a few layers going on.  

You can still a bit of the chevron gelli-print peeking through. ^^

 I started adding some stamped images and blobs of acrylic ink to the under paper, but it looked awful, So, I covered it up with gesso,  running a pencil through the wet gesso in loops at the top left. Then I added splatters of Tulip fabric spray paint, and yellow Prima Bloom ink spray. The gelli-print was printed on white cardstock, and so you can still see the lines of the page. I like that. :) 

The yellow Prima Bloom spray and then blotted with a paper towel, create the texture above. Used partially dried out gesso for the edges of the under paper, so it created some fun lumps. Teehee! ^^ 

Embedded the paper towel for a bit in the wet gesso as seen above. ^^ Added some of that yellow spray here too with some pink Dylusions, making orange. 

 By my calendar, I had doodled with a black Sharpie, but it looked awful too, so I covered most of it with gesso. 

 The circular pattern you can still see through the gesso here was made using one of my hand-carved stamps, in which I had added Neocolors 2 to the middles. Didn't like the effect at all. The pink piece of paper to the right is a piece of cardstock which I deliberated on including on the page. At this point I did not know yet what I was going to create on the page!

Played around with various things by placing things here and there, to see if an idea would come. I went back to it over and over to stare at it for about a week before the idea hit! A tree with a sweater!

On to my tree sweater! 

At the same time as attempting this DLP challenge, I am also trying to keep up with Julie at Balzer Designs #28patterns on Instagram. So I keep a keen eye on anything with a pattern. 

So, with the combination of my mind on patterns, Junelle Jacobson's sweater tree class, the DLP challenge of What Lies Beneath? and making a mess playing with various art supplies, my eyes fell on the patterns of the paper towel...

Lightbulb!

This square-ish pattern would look so cute watercoloured, and cut into squares, mimicking the crochet motifs on my yarn-bombed tree!

I colored in the square using a few different coloured crayons from my Neocolors2 stash, and then wet the towel with a brush. Next, I cut out each square to approximately the same size.

Next came the cutting out of the tree and covering it up with book paper using matte medium.

 I applied a thin layer of Raw Umber acrylic paint to the tree, allowing the book text to still show through.

Next I glued the squares on to the lower half of the tree in a diamond shape configuration. 

Next, some scrapbook paper strips to upper branches.

Next, leaves! This was the hard part. For the background portion (the unfocused leaves) on the tree, I stamped directly to the page. At first they looked like flowers, as I used my new hand-carved flower stamp, For the more "in focus" leaves, I just cut off the petals, making them (kinda) look like leaves. Tried a different stamp too, but the leaves were too large.

Here's a photo of my most recent hand-carved stamps. For the leaves, I used the smallest flower, cutting apart the petals to resemble leaves.

I wrapped the motifs around the tree, and taped them to the back. I figured it would add some dimension to the tree if it was thicker.

Added veins with a Sharpie, and added paint to the leaves. Now they looked more like leaves instead of flower petals.

Loving the luscious painty splats there...^^

Added white modeling paste dots by smoothing it over a stencil on the trunk of the tree. (First I did green dots, didn't like it, so haphazardly put white over the green.)

Added some dots of white paint with a Tim Holtz dot stencil for the negative space.

Added some yellow dots for flowers with Liquitex heavy body paint.

Added quote by J.R.R. Tolkien.

Added some shadowing with a black Stabilo All.

My quote above. ^^

Underneath the warm sweater, is a tree. And it has history, just like the Ents in Lord of the Rings have. ;) 

Some green grass with various watercolours.

And I'm finished!

Hope you enjoyed!

Thank you for stopping by, and have a super day!

Blog Name Change

Hello to you all! :)

For those of you who have visited me here before, I have changed my blog name to Artful Stories. It better reflects my art than did my old name, Annawhocropsalot. I was really starting to cringe everytime I read it, so I took the plunge!

You might experience dead ends on my blog the next few days while I change things over to my new blog name. Sorry for any inconvenience. :(

Have a great day!