Windows of My Mind

At first, the current challenge of this journaling prompt didn't speak to me, but after seeing so many wonderful interpretations, I got inspired.

This is week 43 of The Documented Life Project 2015 - The Journal. If you are unfamiliar with this great art journaling community, do check it out HERE! :)

I got these awesome new stencils (with a grid theme) in my mail box from Stencil Girl's Stencil Club, and had to try them out! :) 

Windows within windows and lettering you can't read. That's my brain most of the time: to borrow that saying about a woman's brain is like having too many tabs open on the computer - too many windows open, and with my speech impediments (mostly just obvious to me) , I find it hard to process properly what I'm trying to say. Yup, going with that. LOL. 

I started with four colors of squares, then I had this brilliant idea of gessoing over everything to add dimension. I did that, regretted it, then tried to duplicate the same thing over again. Yes, a make-work project. LOL So, above photo is what the first layout looked like. Wasn't crazy fond of how I worked the black Stabilo All pencil.

Next...

For the squares, I blended in over the first set of squares stenciled with acrylic paint with similar Gelato colors, ensuring the majority of the color landed in the lower left corner of each square. When dry, I added stenciling with acrylic paint, and finished with a few white dots on each big square.

Black Stabilo All around each square, scribbly frames with gel pens in matching colors for the squares. For the text on the right, I used Stencil Girl's previous month's club stencils with black paint. Ancient lettering, is what that stencil is called. 

This set of stencils has the cutest little designs to fit the grids, and I thought, wow, windows within windows! This will work perfectly with the current prompt. I ditched the glassine, and just went with the journaling prompt this time. Totally allowed, right? :) 

And that's that. :)

Also on my table, many, many gelli prints in the works. If you follow me on Instagram, you might notice I'm on a huge aubergine (a.k.a. eggplant) kick. Everything's purple, including my new board of 90+ pins called Aubergine. Check that out HERE if you want. Teehee. #sorrynotsorry

Yummy ombres!!

For the "Oh, what fun"words I used as a mask, I cut out the words from last year's Starbucks packaging I had saved all this time. I like. More ombre. I am eagerly awaiting a new Traveler's Journal from The Foxy Fix, called Pixie Dust, and it's got these yummy colors. I am seriously inspired by that color scheme and the ombre look! I hope to make notebooks for it with these gelli prints.

This stencil by Traci Bautista called Deconstructed Florals from Stencil Girl make me so happy! (And kraft paper!) 

Well, I'll call that a wrap. Have a great day, art peeps!!! Thanks for visiting, I really appreciate it! 

Anna

DLP Week 35: Self-Portrait

I record all the DLP challenges in a Traveler's Notebook insert. As soon as the new challenge is on the Art 5 blog, I grab my Confettidori that houses this notebook, and I quickly jot down the challenge and prompt. Easy peasy.

Squirrel!!! ::  I purchased the sweet insert shown above ^^^^^ from Natalie at her Etsy shop, ArtichokesElephants! It's a collection of one of three notebooks called Summer Sips. Do check out the goodies in her shop. All items are lovingly made by a beautiful and sweet woman! Her store hasn't been open for a very long time yet, so she deserves a SHOUT OUT!! :) 

Anyway, back to this project at hand. Week 35, August 29th art Challenge was to do a self-portrait. EGADDD!! I like to doodle, but to do a self-portrait?!?! Not on my list of comforts, that's for sure. When I first read all the Art5 ladies' ideas and the guest artist's ideas, I thought, I can do this! I can paint like Pam! (Check out her tutorial for this prompt, it's wonderful! I felt emboldened to try it myself...then a few days passed, then a week...and I wasn't any closer to trying it. Then the next week's DLP prompt came, and it was TRANSFERRING photos! Ooh, I have wanted to try that for a long time, so I quickly started! See below.

The page I put this in was full of painty goodness from playing with my Dylusions paints, just like Ms. Reaveley suggests. It was fun. And busy.

I printed off a photo of me in black and white, then I used a Stabilo All black watercolor pencil to color in the black areas of the photocopy. I couldn't find my Acrylic glazing medium at the time, so I used Decou-Page by DecoArt, and covered my Dylusions page with it, over all the painty stuff, then placed the photocopy face down in the wet medium. I added water and more Decou-Page, let it sit, then slowly pulled it off the page. It had dried a little by this time, so some of the paper stayed behind. That sounds like a failure, but I liked the extra texture and messiness it gave me. BUUUUUUT.....the eyes did not transfer. NOOOOOOO!!! The hardest part!!! The most important part for a portrait to have, right? My brain thought that anyway. LOL! Seriously, I totally winged this thing. I ignored all I had learned about transferring images, and just did my own thing. I'm a rebel, I know. 

Firstly, let me say, I should have stopped at this point. Just like a previous DLP challenge had us do...

Soooo, I needed eyes and more of the glasses. So, I printed off another copy of the photo, and colored in with the Stabilo All to try it again. By this time, I found my acrylic glaze, so I did the same method as the first time, and I achieved a bit more success. Still, the eyes weren't very bold in my piece, but it'll have to be okay. Next came painting. I don't want to describe to you how I painted it, as I have no method, and it didn't work out. I look like I just came off the circus circuit. I guess my life is similar to a circus, so I'll go with it.  I can't work on it anymore, I am too mad at my results, so I'll just leave as is. Maybe in a few years, after I have learned how to actually paint faces, I can come back to it, right? Right? :)

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And a few days later...

I'm calling it done. It kind of looks half done, but I did want some of the painty background showing in the end. LOL It really doesn't look like me, but it's an attempt. My daughter says I should have added my hair, but I like this funky look. The eyelashes and eye lines look too black and the nose wonky, but it'll have to do. :)

Back to more art journaling with a friend of mine! You should see my art "studio"! That gives you me an idea. I'll take a photo of the artsy chaos that is supposed to be our dining room/kitchen...

here it is...

Have a great day! 

Anna

DLP Week 23 Illustrative Art Journaling

Hello fellow art journalers! This post features my latest project for The Documented Life Project 2015 - The Journal. It's hosted by the lovely ladies HERE! 

This is my 14th challenge completed, out of 29 prompts already LIVE. I am not stressing that I haven't completed all the challenges. I want to keep this fun and stress-free, and for me, that means not worrying about staying caught up. :)

I have loved nature and travel illustrative journaling for a very long time! It all started when I read Charlotte Mason's books of a home educating philosophy, particularly of studying nature through nature study and art journaling. (See links towards the end of this post where I share my favorite books about nature journaling. )I've been smitten ever since! So when I read the June 6th DLP Art Journaling prompt, Illustrative Journaling, I was excited! I thought about it week after week, but never actually took the time and courage to work on it. Illustrative journaling is not something that comes easily to me. I struggle with "seeing" in order to draw something. Definitely a wanna-be! One of these years when I have the creative energy, I will really dig in and learn and practice this type of art more.

But, I did do a little bit this past weekend. It's nothing spectacular, but I made an effort, and that counts!! 

The first step for me was to pick two types of leaves near my art table, I mean picnic table, since I'm camping and everything...I traced the shape, then roughly drew in some details, not worrying too much about trying to make it look realistic. Next, I used Inktense pencils and a waterbrush filled with water and Dylusions inks to color my rough sketches. While I was painting, the boys came back from fishing, and lo, my oldest son's first cast into the water brought up a fish! I documented it there in the bottom right corner while he was telling us his tale. That poor fish doesn't really look at all like the Northern Pike, but I think it does resemble a fish, right? Please say yes? LOL

Not long after, my youngest boy came to me with a beautiful feather, so I drew that too. :) I also added in little details about the food we ate, and also some conversation around me. We camped with friends. It was a very simple, slow, relaxing weekend! Our favourite way to vacation.

I finished my whole project up by tearing my painting out of the mixed media sketch book and glueing it into my Dylusions journal. I had prepped the two pages weeks ago, when I was playing with my new Dylusions paints and various stencils.

DONE!!

During our camping weekend, I wandered the beautiful campground and river banks while my hubby and boys swam or fished in the river. My senses soar in nature like this! Lovely trails to the river, bordered by the sweet buffalo bean wild flowers and sweet clover.

Little discoveries here and there.

Levi, Liam and I watched a video earlier in the week about an adventurer building a wattle and daub house in the bush, using absolutely no ready-made tools, and one of the things he did was make a fire by rubbing a stick a certain way. Levi tried it, but did not meet with success. It's harder than it looks!

We camped really close to home, and we had promised to do our neighbor's chores while they were away, so I drove home every morning and evening to tend to their animals. On the way back one evening, I saw this beautiful rainbow. God's glory all around us!!

My fave books about illustrative and nature journaling:

Keeping a Nature Journal: Discover a New Way of Seeing the World Around You by Claire Walker Leslie
Handbook Of Nature Study by Anna Botsford Comstock

Another great resource I haven't pursued very much, but I know will be a gold mine:
 Danny Gregory.

I have one of his books that I've started to read. Need to finish it! Art Before Breakfast

I get lots of inspiration from the pins on my Nature Study board on Pinterest HERE.

Thanks for visiting my blog! Have a great creative week!

Anna

♥♥♥

Daisies Afoot in my DLP Art Journal

June theme for the Documented Life Project is Travel Journaling.

June 20 art prompt is hometown inspiration,

and the journaling prompt is: There is no place like home.

I instantly thought of all the wandering and discovering I and the kids do around home. We have wild nature as our backyard. This year we have lots of daisies growing everywhere and I love taking photos of them! 

My youngest brought me some of the beauties, and they graced my table for a week. I finally got up the nerve to do a little 5 minute sketch. I was quite pleased how it turned out! So next, I got up the courage to color it in with watercolors! I painted it on Japanese Tomoe River paper, which is a strong but very thin, somewhat translucent paper. It has a very similar texture of good quality bible pages. The use of water on the page created an interesting warp, which I think lends itself to the imperfectionist style I am going for. :) Took some manipulating of the paint and water on the page to get it right. Well, I know there's lots of improvements I could make to this, but it's my very FIRST watercoloring piece from a sketch, so I'm happy! A for effort, right? ;)

See this pattern in the center of the daisy? It's a beautiful pattern that is found in many aspects of nature, like in the honeycomb, the pine cone, snail shells, and more. Based on these patterns, the Fabonicci sequence was discovered by classical mathemeticans. I'm not explaining it well at all. I suggest googling it for a clearer idea, if you're interested. They came up with an algorithm for use in many practical ways. It's fascinating to me! Math IS art! I talked about this to my daughter and niece, so that's where the art journal page comes in! I had posted this on my Instagram feed, and chose to copy my words to my page, documenting my "traveling".

I sewed messily around my watercolor painting, and glued it to my page. I added a square of bright yellow paint through a gorgeous stencil above it. Now it sat for a few days, too busy to work on it, or no ideas coming forth of what to do next to make it look cohesive.

A few days later, it all came together. 

A doily at the bottom, cut in half, on a yellow paint and ink background.

I used a fountain pen for the border, which has water-soluable ink in it. I also added Dylusions spray in a water brush, spritzing it several times, and wiping away, repeat, repeat, until I had the look I wanted for the background. The letters are foam stamps, an old set by Magnetic Poetry, from back in the day when I was an avid scrapbooker. It is still one of my very favorite alphabet stamp sets! :)

Before adding anything to the page, I gessoed it first. See the corner? It's thick with gesso and water and paint layers. Once dry, I scratched with an exacto knife, adding more texture to the piece. I spritzed water over Dylusions ink spots by the letters as well, to get a more watercolor-y effect. I also doodled with a white Signo Uniball gel pen over the letters, so that they weren't quite so stark and for added dimension.

And here it is again, the whole page. 

I had a great time doing this! I want to thank the Art 5 ladies for all that they do, inspiring us with great challenges, and it's all free. 

Thanks for stopping by!

Blessings, and ART ON! :)

♥♥ Anna ♥♥