Finally a Real Blog

This is what I've been doing the last few days. While I had no computer and while I had computer glitches I was busy doing art journaling,m especially drawing faces. I've gotten so much better at it. This is what I just finished.

This was a pretty elaborate project. It took several days to do.

 At the end of the first day this is what I had. A nice background and a face just peaking through the background.

I liked it so much it just sat while I did other things for a couple of days. Some of the time it is really hard to get on with it and put on the next layer.

So I did add a next layer. A magazine figure, some washi tape, some stamped tissue paper and a napkin that just went with the color scheme so well I had to use it.

In the final version, the saying had been painted over so much you could not read it. And I lost the butterfly from the napkin in the girl's hair. So I covered a tag with another piece of the napkin that had that butterfly on it and covered the messy saying, and found another one for her hair.

I'm very pleased with how this worked out. I've learned a lot, mostly by practicing.

Take care all.

Sorry it has been so long

It is getting harder and harder for me to blog. I'm not sure why, but I think I'm using my energy to actually do Art Journaling and taking classes in it, and I don't tend to have enough energy left to write about what I am doing. Not sure where this is going to go, but I do have an update.

I did make a cover for the Altered Backgrounds journal that I used for the class I was taking at the Art Geek's site. This is the front cover. I never got the beads on the long strings but I still hope to do that.

And here are my 7 favorite ICADs. I finished them on time. I was actually a day or two ahead during the last couple of weeks because I kept making a second card or even a third on some days. Once I got started I could not stop. One of the cards is the second or third I made but most of these were done later in the process as I got a better handle on how to do an ICAD.

And yes, I do miss them. There are two other regular small projects that are out there. One is to use Rolodex cards. And a second is to make a box to hold slightly larger cards and to do those. Neither is a Summer only project and neither expects you to do them every day for a specific period although a few people are doing them daily or almost daily. I have index cards that are way too big for the ICAD project and I am considering using those because I have so many of them.

 The next three layouts are rather odd, because each of them was made using either a loose sheet or in a separate book.

I've never done a loose sheet Art Journal layout before. I probably should have done this one in one of my commercial Art Journals, but it was possible that it was going to be one of several. This was for a challenge on the Jennibellie ning site. The idea was to do something you wanted to attract into your life, and I took something that is already there that I want to keep in my life.

I really am Just plain Happy to be creating every day, and I want that to continue.

I did I Choose to be Happy in my smaller Strathmore Visual Journal which has 140 pound Watercolor paper and is a joy to work in, but for some reason I am more interested in making my own journals right now. Still, from time to time I come back to this one and to the larger one.

I really do CHOOSE to be happy. It was something I learned you can do back when I was taking care of Joe at home. I could have sunk into depression during that last year, but I found several books on how to be happy, anyway, just because you choose to find things in your life to be grateful for or to enjoy. You can allow joy into your life even when things are bad, or you can sink into it. It really is a choice.

 A 4 page booklet arrived as part of my junk mail a week or so ago. It turned out that it wasn't even stapled together, but just held together with glue. I taped it together and I ended up with a little journal. I was experimenting because all of the others I had made so far, either from booklets of some sort, or with sewn signatures like the Altered Backgrounds Journal, had gesso on the pages. I only used paint on this one and then collaged some stuff onto the various pages. I'm going to try and paint flowers on the pages. This is my first attempt at a flower, and I'm reasonably happy with it.

 Most of my time during the last two weeks has involved taking classes over at the Art Geek's site. One of the classes is the August Obsessions class where we are making a journal out of single sheets of cardstock. Other people in the class are using file folders but my paper cutter is a very old one, and it would not cut file folders, so I ended up using card stock instead.

This is what the two sides of my new journal look like front and backs of all the sheets just put into a pile. They already look different since I've added another layer to them, but since I will be adding two more to them this weekend I didn't update the photos.

It is going to be interesting to see how the binding method will go, but I'm not ready to try that out yet. We will see what we will see.

 I am also taking the Eclectic Journal class at the same time. I already had a journal made out of a church magazine. This class is about either using a magazine or a book and altering it in ways that are different from using gesso or paint. I had one spread and the cover from my old magazine journal so I decided to try the new system on that.

I could only use the full system on the back cover since everything else had some gesso on it. The front cover does have a partial new system on it. All I can say is that I've become a believer because this is the easiest thing I've ever done with making my own journal.

 The photo above is the front cover. The one to the side is the back cover. The idea, also from the class is to use your own previous journal pages to produce things you can use in your new journals. The girl on the front cover is a copy of one of my two painted girls. I got to do some additional pen work on the copy, and I think she looks even better than the original did. I cut her out and pasted her on the cover and put a boarder of a painted paper of my own around the page. I added a fussy cut flower spray as well. The background is painted book pages and a painted paper that I had made quite a while ago.

I used one of the techniques from the Altered backgrounds class when I made up the back cover. I also recycled both the bird and the bird stamp from a previous layout. Using elements from my own art was interesting mainly because there isn't all that much of it yet. I've only been doing art journaling for a few months. But no question that I'm going to be making copies and scanning a lot of what I will be doing in the future so I can use parts of it again. Looks like Photoshop is going to get a workout.

And finally here is the last spread in that journal as well. Like every other thing I did in it this is experimental in some way. I used a dyed paper towel at one end, and washi tape. I doodled and I put some collage on the page but did not cover the entire thing. The hearts were from a deli print I had doodled on. I'm pretty happy with it overall.

So that is what I've been up to. Take care all.

What I've Learned From Doing ICADs

If you had asked me in May if I was capable of doing a tiny piece of art every day for two months I probably would have told you no. I have a hard time committing to anything long term. Or at least I thought so. But here I am on the 46th day of ICAD season and I've got 48 index cards with paint on them.

So one of the things I've learned is that I can commit. I have 48 cards because I mus-numbered one of the cards and decided to make a second one for the official number of that day, and because one day I just could not stop at just one.

One of the things I was committing to was making a single card every day, and for the most part that is what I've done. I've made at least one EVERY DAY.

 So this is the pile I showed a while ago. You can see how many cards there actually are although you can't see most of them well.










And this is a photo of the last 8 days.

I've learned a lot from doing the cards and not just about commitment. I've tried new techniques. I've used supplies I have never used before. I made cut outs using my electronic cutter, and cut things freehand, and stamped and painted and fussy cut things out from the Internet and magazines. I already know that I'm going to be trying out a couple new techniques I've never done before or that I've only done on Art Journal pages while I was taking a class.

Index cards are cheap. If your experiment doesn't work out you haven't spent a lot of money. You can try something new. You can see something someone else has done on YouTube or on the Internet, and try it out for yourself. 

My only problem is that I am going to miss them when July is over. Only 14 more days. I could just keep doing them, but I think there is a reason not to do that. Not totally sure what it really is. I'm sure that looking at the cards from year 1 and the cards from year 2 should show a big jump in quality. I also think that when you come back to them after a year away, you focus on them differently than you did a year earlier. And I think those aren't the only reason not to do them year round. But I will miss them.

Take care all.

What I Have Been Up To

I seem to add "what I've learned" as a tag to almost every post, but that is because I've been learning a lot over the last few months.

First a health update. I still have days when I need lots of recliner time so I can rest, and even lots of naps (sometimes more than one a day) but I am also getting stronger all the time. I now can walk up a flight of 8 or 9 steps with the help of a banister and a cane. Down too. Down is sometimes harder. I've begun to stop avoiding curbs as well, although I'm not as steady with those. I can go into a store and use a cart for support instead of using the store's scooter. The scooters made it possible to shop, but shopping is totally different if you are using a cart. There are parts of the store you just can't get to in a scooter.

So things are going pretty well around here, and I'm still feeling so happy most of the time that I bubble. Can't help enjoying the bubbling.

 I've been reorganizing the studio. I took a bookcase that has been in the garage for almost 10 years and brought it inside. I had to put a small file cabinet into the garage, because there no longer is room for it.

Basically I've run out of room in the bookcases that were already in the room, even with heavy culling.

 This is what the bookcase wall looked like the day the new bookcase came in. It doesn't look this way anymore, and it won't look like this when it is all finished. I'm going to get two additional shelves for the new bookcase, and I'm still deciding what is going where, and I've done even more culling of books that I've had for years, even decades, and which no longer are the kinds of things I'm interested in.




I also have a new toy. This is a Silhouette Cameo cutting machine. I wasn't doing paper crafts when the machines like the Sizzix came out, and I was seriously considering getting a die cutting machine. That was the one I was looking at, but I realized that the one thing I truly wanted to do was to make stencils, and a Sizzix doesn't do that. The Cameo does.

I have now cut 6 stencils. Two in card stock and four in plastic. Since the first two were the first things I ever cut doing them in card stock made sense.

It is interesting just how much one learns if one suddenly has a bunch of stencils, and if one is actually cutting them oneself. The designs I used mainly came from the Silhouette store. Some came from free cutting files on the Internet. None of them were intended to be stencils, and I've had to begun to manipulate the software that came with the Silhouette so I could actually make stencils out of the file. I'm a Geek, so playing with software comes naturally. And with so many YouTube videos, I'm learning fast.

When I'm not playing with the new machine, or trying to make order out of chaos in the Studio, I'm doing some Art Journaling.

I did this page last month, knew that it really wasn't finished and promised to show it again if I made changes. The changes are the lettering. I have never used stickers before, and it was interesting doing that on this page where the ones I had bought a couple of months ago were a reasonable size for the page. The page is in the small journal, so the fact that these stickers are pretty small is not a problem.

There is a woman on YouTube who sells what she calls an inspiration deck of cards with technique prompts on them. Her prompts wouldn't work for me. I don't have some of the supplies she takes for granted, so I started a deck of my own, on index cards on a ring. This was the first page I ever did using cards from that home made deck.

Frankly it is quite different from anything I normally would have done. I like it, I think. But I'm not sure.



 


The next three photos are from the Junque Journal. The one I made from a church magazine. It was intended to be a place where I experimented with stuff I'd never done before.

The profile of the lady is from one of the cardboard stencils I made. The successful one. I like her a lot. The unsuccessful one is in the background of the other page. The experiment there was doing all kinds of doodles that I'm not done before. I'm learning how to doodle. I'm pretty happy with both pages which are not a two page spread although that was the original intent.

The experiment here was doing a collage with papers I had made from doodle and scribble pages done with a very cheap oil pastel. These are actually Crayola oil pastels which cost under $6 for the box. Unlike most of the oil pastels art journaler's use these are not water soluble. But they really blend very well, and were fun to use. They were not fun to work over however, and the black at least turned out to be more water soluble than expected. The black smudged badly. I put a border around it with marker. My black Sharpie marker looked brown on top of the oil pastels. A function of the oil pastels and not of the marker I believe.

I added circles cut out of deli paper that I had printed on the Gelli plate, marked around them and then painted around them with black paint. The oil pastels were not happy with the paint either. And I added white dots and tried to splatter the pages. I don't splatter well. I don't splatter well at all. I just don't understand how to splatter.

But I will figure it out!

Finally one last spread done on the small journal I made myself out of really bad Gelli printed pages.

The first thing I did was use some of the colors from one page onto the other, in both directions. That unified the backgrounds. It was a technique I saw on one of the YouTube videos I watched, but I have no idea who's technique it was. Then ephemera from the Internet printed on my Epson printer which does not smudge. I tried stenciling on the borders of the square drawing, but I'm not sure I liked that.

This journal is also intended for experiments I don't seem to be comfortable doing on the "real" journals, although the layout isn't too different from some I've done in those books.


So that is what I've been doing. I've got a load of organizing to do because I've recognized that I won't be able to use the new bookcase for the art supplies. I moved some and have moved them back. The old bookcase wall is going to have to be where the art supplies go. I won't be able to truly organize things for another week because I won't have all my shelves in place until my handyman comes back. I've bought some organizing plastic, but I'm not sure if it is the right stuff or not. Etc. I'm in a waiting game right now, but I've got to get all this stuff off the floor because it is driving me crazy!

Take care all.

Success? and Failure?

Sometimes we just don't know if something is a success or a failure. And that is where I've been for the last three days.

This is the most recent spread in the Junk Journal. Very much my normal thing. Pretty background. I've gotten to the point where I can get a comfortable blend of colors and then stamp with home made and commercial stamps, until I really like what is there.

Then I added ephemera from the Internet, printed out on my home printer. My Epson printer prints out copies that do not smear. I know that people have some problem with that with other jet printers, but Epson always did have great inks.

I didn't put a smeared border around any of what I added. Or around the page either. That is also my basic style. I am not at all sure I like smeared borders. Or at least not the ones I've done in the past. I need to see if I like distress inks in those areas, but the problem with all of the sprays and inks from Ranger is that none of them are permanent. And I don't really like that they aren't permanent. I've gotten very good at fussy cutting which I did with the roses.

But that was Friday or over the weekend. On Friday I bought a Gelli Printing class that was anything but the normal thing one sees on YouTube. I started doing the actual printing on Monday, and I'm not sure what to say. I learned a lot from Carla Sonheim's class. But I also learned that it is very likely that I can never comfortably do her style of Gelli Printing.

The first two were done on Monday and Tuesday. I was still using my own color pallet, which is mostly bright colors. She suggested that you take card stock and make some masks with it, which I did. Of all of the ones I did with the kinds of masks she suggested this red and yellow piece was the most successful.

The spirals were my idea. She mostly uses circles she has cut, both the positive and the negative. I've gotten very good at cutting spirals.


The tree was my own idea. I used the stencil part of the tree many times, on many different papers. I didn't use the mask part more than once, and none of those were all that successful. Here I used it twice, once in an almost white and once in a darker color, over a very colorful background.

I think it is interesting that the two most successful pages out of the 16 or 17 I did in the three days were done on the first day in a bright color scheme.

 Here is another tree but in the muddy, dark colors I was using on Wednesday. Not anywhere as successful as the Monday/Tuesday ones. I've decided that dark, muddy colors just aren't for me.

Over all, I'm glad I took the class. It was only $25, and it was short. She has a second one for $35, but one advantage to the fact that she broke the two classes up instead of selling them for $60 as one class is that I'm going to have some time to digest what I've learned, and put it into practice before I go on to additional techniques, if I choose to take the second class too.

So what have I learned?

I also cut a tulip stencil out of card stock. Having multiple broken sections on the bottom of the stencil, which this one has, makes it very difficult to take it off the plate and almost as difficult to just put it on properly. So stencils, even card stock stencils cut out with scissors without drawing first, need to have solid bottoms.

I've also learned several Gelli Plate techniques that I've never seen before on YouTube, and can infer several additional ones. I've done a bunch of masking, not just the trees and tulips, circles and spirals, but the wavy lines you can see most clearly in the bottom photo, and I know I'll be doing a lot more of that. There are at least two paint techniques that will become a permanent part of my toolbox. I don't feel I can explain them here because they are a basic part of her course.

Take care all.

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.

   

Binding Books?

One of the things I never expected to do in my life was to bind a book. And I still haven't, but in the Art Journaling world, people go on about making their own journals. There is a bunch of reasons for doing it, and I found myself having a couple of them. What I made was a simple pamphlet, or rather two of them with a third in the wings. Let me show you.


One reason to make a pamphlet is that you've got all of these papers you have painted, or made on the Gelli Plate, and now what are you supposed to do with them.

 This is a classic answer. You make a journal out of them.

A second reason is that you need a place to experiment where the materials are cheap, not precious. And my two "real" art journals are made out of good paper. So I've got a second classic answer.

The journal with the yellow cover is out of paper I painted very early in my journey and that was always intended for a hand made journal. There are a total of 4 sheets, or 8 pages, or 16 surfaces in that one. Some are painted, some have just gesso on them, and some are actually bare paper.

The red and blue one is just binder clipped together right now. I have not sewn it yet.

I've done two pages in the Gelli Printed journal. I wanted to see what would happen if you used a stencil and just painted in either white or in black on backgrounds that were just a Hot Mess. That is also an Art Journaling term, but it is self evident. The papers were pretty, but almost unusable. I think the white worked better, but it is possible that with a different stencil the black would have worked well too.

This is also an experiment. Two totally different kinds of backgrounds. I tied them together with some light blue paint and then just went with it. I'm happy with the result.

I also tried my new Inktense pencils. They are the dark black lines. And pulled out my GelSticks and got a wash out of them with water after I colored. So I've successfully used two new media that I have bought and not used much yet. Havi9ng a place to experiment works.


I'm not sure what will go into the Yellow Journal, but I'll figure it out.

Take care all.

Art Journaling, mostly

Since the big Gelli Print day I've been art journaling.

 I did another face, and boy is this one better. I still need to work on painting eyes, but between watching YouTube videos and following the PDF file that came with one class I bought, I think I did a pretty good job. I did not paint the butterflies. They were from sheets of butterflies I found online and printed out and cut up.

By the way, a lot of people have problems with prints from their dot matrix (non-laser) printer smudging. I can attest that the Epson ink does not smudge once it is dry even when you are using very wet media to paste it down.

I'm pretty sure I showed this page before but I wasn't sure so I photographed it again. But just as with the butterflies above there was some pasting going on here. All of the sentences were printed on my printer, cut out and glued down.

This page started out with being completely covered with paper I had painted on regular copy paper or deli paper or book pages or very old music pages from the Internet. And all of the brides and grooms were from similar ephemera, from sites that have free downloads.

I had a lot of trouble with this page because the papers were all different and some of them wrinkled badly, and others went down pretty well. But I like the finished page.

By the time I got to this page I'd learned a lot about gluing things down. The two big green areas are from a napkin that had the birds printed on it. And it went down with no wrinkles at all. There was just a tiny bit of tearing, but I think I've finally figured out how to do this and get it right.







This one is from the small journal. The two color schemes are similar, but there are also differences. I did work on them almost simultaneously, and that tends to result in similar color schemes for me.









And finally this is what my table looks like after I've finished a project and haven't started another. I need to clean up and I will. That filthy glass is not the glass I drink from. I'm careful to keep my own glass far away from the table, although I did almost set my coffee cup in wet paint yesterday. The filthy glass is my water for painting. I need to come up with something else, but haven't figured it out yet.

Take care all.

Gelli Plate, etc.

First I need to tell the story of the printing plate from the last blog. I wrote to the company I bought it from. I only told them how unhappy I was and why, a very short email. I wasn't angry. I didn't ask for anything. I got an almost immediate reply from them telling me to send it back, where to send it back, and that they would give me credit for it (to use in their "store") when they received it. The company that sold it to me is Blitsy.com. I didn't mention their name the last time because this mess wasn't their fault, but their customer service is very good. The plate is called the Creative Pallet from Stampendous which is a brand name. I'm telling you the name because no one else should make the mistake of buying this item.

I ordered the one I should have ordered in the first place from Amazon the same day I wrote the last blog. It arrived this afternoon, and I've been playing.

This is what the Gelli Plate looks like. I spent the morning getting ready for it. I made three special stamps for it and peeled one side of a bunch of cardboard. When it arrived I used two of the stamps, one more I already had that was commercial, and a stencil.

These were the four best prints from the Creative Pallet.













And these were the 6 best prints from the Gelli Plate. I was afraid the two on the right wouldn't photograph as well as they should have, so I made this photo large. The purple one on the top is only one layer and so delicate it looks like purple lace. The one on the bottom was made with the cut paper mask that was the other half of what stuck to the Creative Pallet. Four of these were printed on card stock and two on Deli paper. I also printed over some of the prints I'd made the other night, but none of them resulted in anything that made the cut.

Do you see all the happy flowers in the two on the left. That was from the very childlike looking flower stamp. The lines in the background of the orange print was the peeled cardboard. These are all very common beginner's prints that just about everyone manages to make, but I am really pleased with my first real attempt at this kind of thing. After all, I am a beginner!

Take care all.