Art Journal Page #6

This is my latest art journal page.  I have seen a couple pages where they put a couple different scraps of things on the page to give it texture then painted over it so I decided that I wanted to give it a try :D.  It was super easy but I wish I would have spent more time finding things to put on there, I have seen people using puzzle pieces, doodles done with hot glue, cut outs from card stock, that sort of thing.  I just grabbed a few different things and slapped them on there with a TON of Mod Podge to hold it all on there.  I should have probably used a different kind of glue but after a ton of layers it seemed to hold everything down really well.  I have a piece of lace, a couple different textures of string, a button, some scraps of paper, some tulle, some rick rack, and some wire that I folded into a heart shape.  After I had it all put down I squirted blue all over the paint and used a small foam roller to spread it around.  When the blue had dried I put a few squirts of the yellow on the page and spread it out with the foam roller.   I put this quote on there just using a paint brush, my horrible handwriting, and a little black acrylic paint.  Overall I think this page turned out pretty good for my first attempt at this sort of look, I love the idea, the colors, and the quote but next time I will put a little more time and effort into what things I put down and where I put them.     

Art Journal Page #5

On this page I wanted to include some snippets of things I have gone to and done so far this December. The page I had originally started on this page no matter what I did just kept looking weirder and cheesier.  After a full two hours of trying I just covered the whole thing in duct tape and tried again :D.  The paint pealed off of the duct tape a little in one part put I heavily Mod Podged it and it hasn't pealed any more since that one spot.  

So to create the background on this page I took a berry red color, a light grey/green and an off white then I used a credit card to blend the colors around.  After that dried I used a light blue and a sponge brush and splotchy smeared it onto the page.  Then I arranged the  pieces that I had cut out across the page and used Mod Podge to attach them all.  

This Willy Wonka ticket was cut out from my ticket to the musical that my friend was in, I also cut her name out of the program and put it next to the cut out.  The DEC and 2014 are also from the program,  

The "Holiday Windows" thing is from an intermediate school performance that two of the kids I babysit were in and I went to watch them.  I wrote their names out on some blue paper and put them next to it.  

The penguin and snowmen are from one of the days of my daily calender and I just cut them out of their backgrounds to put on here.  The big black DEC was just a random scrap that I found laying around and I painted it black.  Over all it is not one of my favorite pages but it is not horrible either :).  

Art Journal Page #4

Here is my newest page!  Even though I don't feel like the whole page is that awesome all together the background was really fun and kind of just happened by accident.  First I had these neon food colors that I wanted to try using.  

First I put a few layers of paper towels down and sprayed them with water.  

 

 Then I used the food coloring and just dropped it randomly all over the wet paper towels

Then I rolled the paper towels up and squeezed them a little to spread the color out through all the paper towels. 

After I unrolled the paper towels and took them apart they looked like this, kind of tie died and splotchy.  I saved these and will probably use them in another page.   

 I spread Mod Podge all over the page and stuck pieces of the paper towels all over it.  When I peeled it off it left this cool pattern of awesome color.  I did this quite a few times to make layers of color and until it looked like enough color.  I also sprayed the paper towels in between to keep them moist and leave color onto the page.

This is the final result.  

 It was really easy and looks so cool.  You could also do it with just one color or just a few to make it more specific to a color scheme

I added the things I'd rather be doing over the top which I love that idea but I don't really like to colors I used for paper underneath the words 

Art Journal Page #3

This is my third page and so far it is my favorite!  I wanted to do a page and use my stencils and also not have any quotes since my other pages have quotes on them, I also wanted to use my washable crayons and really put them to the test :).   

First I sprayed the page with a little bit of water and used four different colored crayons for each page and did a kind of fade with the colors. Then I sprayed it with more water and lightly used a brush to blend the colors.  The crayons had a cool effect and once they dried weren't smudged by Mod Podge which is something that I had trouble with watercolors doing. But since they are washable if you smudge them too much they will pretty much smudge away to nothingness so when you add the water smudge just a little tiny bit then move on.  If you aren't happy with it though you can completely remove the color from the page and try again.     

Then I used some Gesso, my circle stencil, and a sponge brush to randomly add the dots.  I wasn't really too careful about making the neat and I just did them in random spots on the page.   

 For the circle parts of the tree I used my Mod Podge lid and the lid of a mason jar to draw out the circle shapes on some book paper from another book.  Then I cut them out and used two colors of oil pastels for each circle, I colored the lighter color further into the circle then the darker color on the edge and used my finger to smear the color towards the center.  Then I put them onto the page using Mod Podge.

I used black acrylic paint to draw the trunk part of the tree, and even unartistic little ol' me was able to do these and make them look half decent.  So if you want to try painting the page is a good thing to try if you aren't very artistic because it is very simple things but you are still using a paint brush and paint.

I used white acrylic paint on a big, stiff, round brush and kind of dabbed it on for the clouds 

For the grass I used two different brushes and two colors of green and a white ( mixed with one of the greens) and just filled it in with simple downward strokes until I felt like I had enough.  

So there is this page!  It was fun and simple, I wish it had a little more texture but oh well at least it has quite a few layers of things going on.  

Art Journal Page- #2

This is the second page that I have done and so far my least favorite... I had grand ideas and it just turned out very blah, but I figured I would show y'all anyway.   

First I mixed a little dark blue watercolor paint with some black to make it even darker and painted the whole page with that. I used oil pastels to draw the snow man, first of all I am horrible at drawing and the snowman kind of ruined the page in my opinion.  I used water color paper and put some white, yellow, green, and a tiny bit of blue then used a credit card to smear the colors together and cut out the moon shape. 

 I used water color paper and put some white, yellow, green, and a tiny bit of blue then used a credit card to smear the colors together and cut out the moon shape. 

I used watercolor paper and oil pastels to try and do some snowish colors then I used my finger to smear it around and used Mod Podge to paste it onto the page.  

I also used water color paper and reds and a white and a credit card to smear it, then I cut out all the letters.  I think the letters turned out really cute.  I am very happy with them, even though it took a long time to cut out each letter.  I also used some white paint to do little snowflake ish things.  It was all going ok except for the snowman until I tried to put mod podge over the whole thing because I used so much thick paper.  I tried to put the Mod Podge on thick and just kind of dab it on but I still ended up smearing a TON of the paint as you can see in the picture.  So it all kind of looks gloopy and smeared.  Oh well, now I know that they paint I used does not work well with Mod Podge and also to try and use thinner paper whenever I can so I don't have to use as much glue.  

  

First Journal Page!

I just found my camera today, I have already done a couple pages in my journal but I thought it would be lame to talk about them without pictures so here is the first page!  

In the future I am going to take pictures as I go but as I didn't know where my camera was and I still wanted to work on it I decided to just go for it.  

This first page I used soft pastels in the background, I used a redish pink color, an orange, and a yellow.  I put the pink on the outside then colored with the orange then the yellow then I took a spray bottle of water and misted the colors and used a paint brush and my fingers to blend all the colors together.  I also took the pink and ran it more concentrated on the edges of the page.  

Then I took a stencil that I had and traced the outline of this flower thing with a black sharpie then using watercolors I filled in the flowers not really being super careful to fill in all the way up to the lines or to stay in the lines for a softer more loosey-goosey  look :).   

For the words I took some watercolor paper and put some squirts of my water colors in a few different colors all over it and then I misted it with some water and used an old credit card to smear the colors together then I wrote the words out using the Bic pens (which actually worked really well) and cut out the little tiles. I used Mod Podge to glue them down then used Mod Podge over the whole page because it felt a little chalky because of the pastels.  

Overall I am really happy with this page!  I love the colors a lot and it turned out pretty good for my first attempt.  Of course there are a few things I am not a fan of, the biggest thing is that I used green for the word tiles.  Now that I am looking at it I wish I would have used blue or purple the green blends in a little too much with the green "petals"  of the flower in the background so the saying does not really stand out a ton. I still love it and think it is super cute though, just something to remember for future pages- try to think about what is the background and what is the foreground and try to make a noticeable contrast between the two.  

Prepping an Old Book for Art Journaling

The past couple days I haven't had a TON of time to work on my newest adventure but in whatever time I can spend (let's just say I have been staying up a lot later than usual :D ) I have been prepping my journal.  I did quite a bit of research before jumping into the prep here is kind of a list of tips that I have learned and things that I have read that I should do :).

- Somewhere I read that you should tear out like every other page so that once you start painting and adding extra papers and stuff to your book the binding might get overly strained trying to contain all the extra stuff you are adding. After you do that you can use the papers that you ripped out for adding back into your journal in different ways later.  I started tearing pages out and ran into a little bit of trouble, because I got a book that had stitched binding instead of glue which I read was best.  With a lot of stitched binding though instead of each individual page being glued in they print two pages worth onto one sheet and then sew it down the middle so when you tear out one page it makes another page somewhere else in the book kind of not be very secure in the book anymore.  That was a really bad description of what is happening but if you understand what I am saying and would have any idea of what I am doing wrong, please let me know!

- I also used Mod Podge to glue the paper together.  So each "page" is now twice as thick and my book doesn't have as many pages that are usable for art writting on, but I think that will help with bleed through

- I am also working on using Gesso to cover each page to create a better surface for drawing/painting on.  One video that I watched said to pour the Gesso onto a page and spread it out using an old credit card or gift card and I finally tried that.  Truthfully it didn't really work well, it spread it a little too then for my liking and I felt like if I had a spot that wasn't covered well it was hard to move the Gesso over to that spot and it was also hard to get up by the binding side of the book without making a mess.  I have been using the cheap little foam brushes from Walmart to spread it and they work great, the Gesso actually washes really easily out of the brushes if you do it before the Gesso dries then you can use them quite a few times.

Start up art Journaling supplies

As planned I got to go to Walmart today in search of art journaling stuff to start out my collection.   Here is a list of everything I got. Sadly I can't find my camera so I won't be able to take pics of everything but the only thing I got at the Flea Market was two older looking hard back books I only spent $4 on both of the books, one of them is smaller and I will use it to start so I can kind of see what I think about doing it and learn techniques and stuff and this book was only a dollar so I figured it was a good starting point :).  At Walmart to buy all of this stuff I spent about $43

- Some Stencils by the brand Plaid It has about twelve different stencil patterns I think most of them will be good for background things it it was only about $3ish it has little dots and squares and a rectangle pattern that I think I can get a lot of use out of them I really had my eye on some other more fancy background stencils but I figure I would start cheap and see if I actually use them then if I want to try more expensive things I can.

- Some BIC Cristal pens, I got one pack of black and one pack of different colors

- A pack of 48 cardboard stencils from the brand Plaid, the one called floral icons, it has quite a few really cute gardeny things that would be cute as background stuff or main things I don't know how well cardboard will work but they were cute and cheap enough to try out

- A small foam roller brush thing (Plaid brand again :D) for stenciling and it was just $1

- A set of Alphabet stamps by Hampton Art brand they were just like a dollar and I figured they would be reusable for doing quotes and such

- A basic, cheap, black ink pad

- Washable Crayons, I am going to try to see if they work as crayons that you can blend with water but if not I will just put them in my babysitting bag cause I am out of crayons anyway :D

- A set of 25 Oil pastels

- A set of four sponge brushes

- Clear Matte Mod- Podge

- I splurged and bought some white gesso because I even though some people say you don't need it, I think it will be helpful for prepping my older books and I am thinking that it is one thing that I will actually get a lot of use out of.  It was about 10 dollars and I got 16 ounces

Yeppers that is about all that I got today, I am thinking that it is a good start and I will be able to create quite a few different pages and looks with that and I think $43 is quite enough for a start.  Now I am going to fully prep my book and then get started!  Sadly though I didn't get home until late tonight and tomorrow I have to leave at 8am to babysit and won't be back until like dinner time and then we have peoples over for dinner so I probably won't get to start messing with it until the day after :(

  

Starting the process

I have recently been entranced with the beautiful art journals floating around on the internet, at first I was all like "YEAH" LET'S DO IT!  Then I remembered that I have the artistic talent of a dead slug, yeah bummer.  While I love doing DIYs and trying out different crafty projects I am not very good at  sitting down with paint and random objects and creating something beautiful.  I have never been good at coming up with good scrapbook ideas, and I seriously CANNOT draw.  Even though I have all this stacked against me I kept being drawn to the idea and eventually I started watching youtube videos and reading more in-depth blog posts and I slowly realized that a lot of the journaling pages I am drawn to don't take a lot of drawing skills (hehe, pun not intended).  So I figured "Hey, that's one of my barriers torn down, that pretty much means that I am meant for the job!"  So for starters I am just going to use inspiration that I find online and just try to pretty much copy it.  That might be plagiarism but since this is just me trying to figure out if I can do this and I am not going to be selling it or anything I think it is ok, right?  I am also going to start trying to mix different ideas I have seen and just see where it takes me and see if I can do this.  For one thing I am usually not a fan of sappyness, and sappy girly quotes often make me gag so don't excpect to see a lot of that :D.  Also I am pretty cheap so I am probably not going to end up spending tons and tons of money on random art supplies unless I have fully researched it and found what is the best for my needs and skill sets.  I live in a pretty small town so as far as fancy pants craft stores we have....... Wal-mart, yeah, yeah, fancy.  So I am hoping to be able to get some random things at Flea Markets because we actually have two really good ones around here.  Tomorrow I am planning on going shopping to get a few starter things so that I can get started.  So here is my basic starter list of things that I am going to be looking for!
- Water colors (thankfully we already have some from an art class Mom tried to teach us once, yeah we never opened them :D, but they are actually nicer ones)
- basic craft paints (I already have quite a bit of this as well!)
- A book ;) (I am planning on finding an older thrift store book as a journal so I can use the awesome vintage printing show through on occasion and also they are cheaper.  I have ready that I should look for one that has sewn binding instead of glue and if I can't find one with thicker pages then I will use glue or Mod-Podge to glue every other page together to make each page a little thicker. If I can't find I good book I am going to look for an old piano book that is either spiral bound or sew bound because the pages are often thicker and I love the look of music scores as a back ground)
- If I don't use an old piano book as my journal than I want to get one to use for some background pages
- Mod Podge
- Random old cheap books that have cool poems in them or cool pictures (I'm thinking vintage children's books if I can bring myself to cut those up)
- Old buttons
- Letter stencils and any cute stencils I can find at Wal-mart
- Some sponge brushes for applying paint and stenciling
- If I have extra money some water soluble Oil Pastels
- As far as pens for writing on top of paint I read that Bic Crystal Ball-point pens are the best for cheap
- I also read that Bingo Markers from Dollar Tree are a good cheap alternative to spray paint you just poor the ink into a small spray bottle.
- A pack of colorful Dollar Tree tissue paper (to use for texture or to bleed to color onto a page)
- Candles or crayons to melt the wax and use as extra texture in a page (I already have enough of these to start and see what I think about working with them)

I think that is all the things that I am going to look for as of now
Another thing that I am going to start collecting that is pretty much free is any random scraps of paper that I get during the day, like a receipt from Flea marketing, an instructional list that I get while babysitting, tissue paper from a gift, a coloring page from a kid I babysit, the packaging on a new pack of pens, an old bookmark found in a library book.  Basically we come across a lot of different scraps of paper or cardboard in a day that could be easily used to inspire a whole page so I have a little zip-lock bag that I am going to keep in my purse to keep any sort of thing item that might be cool in my journal then when I am ready to sit down and begin the project I can get everything out and see what would actually be fun and what just needs to be trashed.

Check back soon for a list + pictures of what I actually ended up finding!  

Oh and if you are looking for some good well thought out blog posts about cheaper alternatives to the more traditional art journaling tools check out the Art Alchemist blog she has three really good posts about it that I found really interesting to read.