Virtual Art Journaling is Fun, But Not So Easy

Well, when I started out to do a blog. I had all sorts of good intentions about regularity, but we all know how those intentions end up...Life happens, your Muse takes a holiday, you find yourself going to but never getting there. So even if I am not posting every week, I do try.

For the last few days I have been making pages for an Art Journal--whatever that is. In my case, it turns out to be an excuse to play with different techniques and materials. I got some new Martha Stewart Craft Paint to try, and I found that I really love the stuff! I am gleefully adding it to my stash of inventory--art NEEDS inventory, remember? When it came on sale at half price for a day at Michaels, I loaded up on a set of Satin colors and a set of Pearl/Metallic colors. I got one glitter--copper--to use for Halloween, and an almost-white, and black, and indigo and a bright blue. I find I will need a bright green, a purple, and a dark brown. Of course I can mix the colors, but for craft paints, I like to get the color already mixed. I also used Golden heavy body acrylics for some pages.

So I scanned all the pages I did, and today I made a virtual art journal using some of the scans.

This is the title page

I used some Elmer's glue with the Martha paint to make crackle pages, and I also used Ranger's Distress Crackle Paint. I had to thin that some--it dries out in the jar, and you have to keep an eye on it to thin it before it gets too hard.

On the left, yellow craft paint layered with Elmer's Glue-all and red craft paint; on the right, copper metallic craft paint layered with Elmer's and blue craft paint

These pages have Distress crackle paint over Martha's craft paint

You have to zoom in pretty far to see the crackles. The two methods give quite a different effect. I have some acrylic crackle stuff to mix with my Golden colors, and I will have to give that a workout soon.

Here is the first spread after the title page.

I have been taking of series of pictures of me reflected in various objects, such as mirrors, windows, tea kettles, and this bottle, which I saw at the Saturday Market in Ilwaco when we were vacationing in Long Beach, Washington last September.

I like
I like these birdies just the way they were, so I didn't do much to them in Photoshop.

I have a lot of fun collecting things to make texture in my art. One really super find was a piece of blue plastic bubble wrap with triangular bubbles arranged in hexagons. It gets a lot of use in my art.

These circles were made using a glue stick container.

Now I have switched to Golden heavy-body acrylic. I painted a thick coat of the green, and mashed the holder I got with a pack of glue sticks into it. I also painted the holder with Golden magenta and stamped with it. Some wet brushwork over the green side thinned the paint out some. The photographs are some I took this summer.

My daughter, Susan Ruth, is an artist; these pages salute her . The circles are made with a pill-bottle top.

My daughter, Susan Ruth, lives in Nashville. She is a singer-songwriter who paints. She is over six feet tall, so you can see she doesn't deal in miniatures! The top two on the left are from a gallery opening; the painting on the bottom is recent work. She gives her paintings interesting titles. You probably can't see that the bottom one is called "From My Window I See Possibilities." The paint used here is Golden cobalt teal heavy body acrylic.

I used stencils on this spread.

For this one, I used a page twice and stuck it on a scan of the spiral wire
and  inverted the colors in Photoshop; more stencilling.

A spread cobbled together in Photoshop from two larger pages;
on the left, magenta Golden paint; on the right, Elmer's and Martha Stewart craft paint.

All in all, it was a grand couple of play days! Very refreshing! ---Nan