Junk Journals, Doodling and ICADs

So yes, that says Junk Journals. In addition to the two books I sewed up and the one book waiting sewing, I've been trying to turn a Church magazine into a junk journal. After all, once one has read all the articles, the only thing one normally does is throw it away. My local garbage company doesn't recycle magazines or white paper.

This is my third attempt (fourth?) at turning something like this into a journal. I finally succeeded and you can tell because there is paint all over the cover although I have not yet painted the cover.

The magazine is a short one. And it is made of unusually heavy paper. The entire thing is made out of paper usually used for the covers.

I put masking tape on the cover and inside all of the pages to keep liquids from destroying the magazine when I gesso the  pages or paint on them. That is what happened to the other attempts.

So this was where the first journal page was when I went to bed several days ago. It felt finished to me, but I knew that this journal like the others I've made was intended as a place to experiment. And the experiment I needed to do was doodling, which you can see I did quite a bit of, and layers. There are a bunch of layers on this piece, but I wanted more.

This is the same page, several layers later You can see bits of the previous layers in between the blue. More stamping and stenciling, some collage, more doodling, more paint and some oil pastel crayons. I liked the first set of layers, but I like this set too.








This is the second spread in the junk journal. I forgot to take a photo of this spread before I added the collage. It wasn't finished. Even I didn't think so, but it was an interesting first set of layers.

The collage layer is book pages and some painted magazine pages.

I did a bunch of stamping done on top of that.

Then stenciled butterflies and doodling. And at this point I just could not paint over it and do more layers. I intended to, but just could not.

I was watching someone on YouTube finish up her spread and I watched what those finishing touches were. I had already drawn around the butterflies first with marker (see above) and then with the oil crayon and smudged. I'm not sure I like the oil crayon here. I had doodled inside the butterflies with white and I added more doodling in black, which I like the look of. I also added the smudged border around the spread and I'm not sure what else at this point, but I know that as I watched, I got up three times and just did some of what she had done.


I have also been doing ICADs. (Index Cards A Day) which seems to be a Summer event every year. The idea here is that you have a cheap, small surface and you do something with it every day. Basically the idea is that if it is cheap and plentiful, you will be able to work with it even if it isn't perfect.

Here are the first 5 out of what is supposed to be 60, made during the months of June and July. I started a day late, but since it was just one card I decided to catch up.

I've been using supplies I have in the house that I have not used either at all or much. Oil markers on the flower including gold and silver markers. The theme for the red card was supposed to be Circus and I put in the lights that used to be strung in country fairs. The green one is a play on my name which is Stella, which means Star and I did a Starry, Starry Night. Both of them had glitter which I didn't like, so I tried to wipe it off and instead the entire card got covered in a light coat of glitter, which I did like. I did the red one first and then did the blue/green one as well. The next two cards have writing on them. Like a lot of people I don't like my handwriting so I'm forcing myself to do some writing on some of these cards.

Another thing that I've been working on is doodling. I had a bunch of gelli printed delli paper that frankly were going nowhere, so I pulled them out and pulled out some markers and this is what I got.

I practiced all kinds of doodles in white and black markers. I had one extra heavy black marker and you can see some of that on the bottom picture.

These were always intended as papers to be collaged with and now they are interesting enough for that to actually happen.

I did them this morning and I really like what happened.

But I know I need to do more of this before I'm really comfortable doodling. And this is a great way to turn some gelli prints into something I'm likely to use.

Take care all.