Still in the Studio

I have been having so much fun painting and playing with my new toys. I've also been organizing all those new toys, but I've got more stuff coming in, so I'll talk organization in a later blog when I have more of it set up.

I am trying to learn a bunch of things at the same time. Or trying to relearn things I knew 50+ years ago. Too many things. Too fast. But I am enjoying the trying.


I've done several layouts in the small journal. I used paper cut into hearts in the first one. I found hand written "paper" written in French online for a free download and I used that for the hearts. I'm trying to learn how to do backgrounds that are light enough to actually do something on, how to hand letter, and how to begin to doodle all on this page. It came out pretty well, and I do like it.

This second one has more cut paper. The bird is colored with colored pencils. Not at all sure I care for that look. The eggs in the nest and the nest itself are papers I painted for collage papers. Love the nest and eggs. The words are stamps this time.

More hand lettering on the page below. Although the word THANKS is a computer font. I am taking an online class on lettering and the hand lettering on the lines was my take on the homework project. 

Not sure how I feel about the hand lettering. It is OK, but frankly my hand shakes. This project was done with a marker with a small, thin tip. I do need to try to do something similar with a thicker marker. But you can really see the shakes when I use it. More thicker marker below.

Another thing I'm trying to learn to do is faces. I'm pretty happy with this one, which is my first, ever attempt to color a face. The last couple I showed you were just regular pencil.

This is a colored pencil technique. Not sure why the girl's eyes look darker in the second photo. The actual color is close in the first one.

I am not really happy with colored pencil techniques. It takes a lot of patience to do colored pencil well, and I do not seem to have the patience for it. Anyway, I think I'd like the look of an acrylic painted face, with or without pencil or markers on top of it. I bought an online class for faces, but it turned out to be watercolor, which is one technique I'm staying away from for a while. I did find a bunch of YouTube videos about painting faces with acrylic, and I've picked one set from one teacher and I'm going to try her technique next.

In the meanwhile I've got background and painting issues that I'm giving some time to. The page next to the girl's is a great example. That is the second page I painted there. The first one was so bad I put a layer of gesso and two layers of paper on top of it until I could no longer see the original page. The page is so thick it is hard to turn the page in the journal.

I found a set of videos online about painting on magazine pages. I couldn't figure out why one would want to do that until I actually tried it last night.

Here are the first three.

Basically it is totally freeing. I'm not doing a JOURNAL PAGE. I'm not doing anything except playing. If the results are totally horrible, I can just throw it all away, but the intention is to make collage paper while practicing with brushes and paint and stencils and large background stamps until you feel totally free.

The person who put the videos up is Alma Stoller, and her thing is that you can use really cheap materials to learn with. She uses cardboard too and found pages to make journals with. I'm not sure how useful those journal pages turned out to be since they were just magazine and book pages. But the painting on the magazine stuff is really useful.

I'm figuring out several things. I'm getting a feel for which colors can be painted into one another wet in wet because that also is part of her system. I getting a feeling for what can be put on top of what you painted under. And which colors will cover the page, and which will not and how to deal with that.

I love how the flowers turned out in the bottom photo, and the background is one of my favorite ones. It might be hard to cut that one up into little pieces, or it might be more fun that anything else I've done. The swirls on the green leaf page were added today. I really like that. The one on the right in the upper photo isn't finished. I put it aside to dry before I start with more layers.

I couldn't wait to get up and get into the studio today to play with my magazines. Can't wait to get back to it either.

Take care all.