Art Journal: What I Did This Summer

Somehow the summer has flown by and next weekend is already Labor Day!! I have been a negligent blogger and will try to catch everything up in one post via my art journal entries:

At the end of July I worked on a spread incorporating all the 12 plants/flowers associated with the months/suits in the Japanese card game Hanafuda. (If you've ever wondered how Nintendo got its start, the company originally manufactured hanafuda cards.) I drew these while attending the Inspire Your Life art retreat organized by Kim Geiser.
I took workshops in Interactive Art Journal techniques taught by Kim Rae Nugent (see sample at left) and Renewing/Redoing Your Wardrobe taught by Geri Justinger, and I taught a class on making Faux Tintype ATCs. We were in Kim Geiser's store/studio in downtown Manitowoc, Wisconsin, and you can see photos from the weekend on Flickr.

The August Sketchbook Challenge theme is "Every Day Objects" so I started this next spread with a staple gun, chicken wire, popcorn and Kleenex:

But summer is the fair & festival season in Milwaukee, and we hit the Wisconsin State Fair in early August, and the farm animals took over!

I'd been meaning to make sketches from all the photos I take of my sister's horses and chickens, and I finally did! In addition to State Fair, we also hit Summerfest and Irish Fest to see Gaelic Storm, which is probably the most festivating we've done in one year. (Sure, that's a real word.) So I leave you with my favorite Gaelic Storm song:

Art Journal: What I did in April (and May)

Spring has been busy with work and catching up on long overdue art projects. I have been working in my art journal every day but tend to do a little bit at a time so it takes me a week or more to finish a spread. I've been playing with Carla Sonheim's book Drawing Lab for Mixed Media Artists, which has fun exercises.

This spread started with splotches of watercolor in which you try to find animal shapes:


One of her exercises involved doodling cats, and since the April Sketchbook Challenge theme was "Branching Out/Out On A Limb," this evolved:


"One Liners" required drawing with one single line (which I had to color, of course):


In between doodling faces, I did a bit of scribble drawing (on the upper right page):


I started May off with some "Cheater Blind Countour" drawing. (You get to peek while doing blind contour drawing from photographs, so you can make sure the lines meet up!)


Hope you're having a creative spring!
UPDATE: Here are the blind cheater contours painted with Twinkling H20 watercolors.

Art Journal: deMengian Mumbo Jumbo

This past week, I've been working on a journal spread inspired by Michael deMeng but since the March Sketchbook Challenge theme is Spilling Over, I perhaps used some of his techniques to excess!

I was fortunate to take two workshops from Michael at the Raevn's Nest Art Retreat in 2008, and I learned a lot from his techniques creating the effect of age and patina using acrylic paints. All these images started out as black & white photocopies of Dover vintage clip art (and one 19th century portrait from my personal collection) and were colored with paint. My friend Gary used Michael's "ghostly glow" technique on his ATCs last month, so I had a go at that with mixed results. The interpretation of this collage is up to you!

March 1-5, 2011

Art Journal: Opposites Distract

Inspired the Sketchbook Challenge theme for February "Opposites" - I decided to do a spread where I went in the opposite direction of what I usually do. So I used colors I don't particularly like to work with like bright red, yellow and green. I'm more of a purple & blue gal!  I pulled out some handcarved stamps that I had made in a workshop but didn't like how they turned out because they were so "blocky" (Yes, I know that's how handcarved tends to look.)

As my blog title implies, I like to work with vintage images, so the opposite direction, painful though it would be, demanded a contemporary photo, and since I hate using pictures of myself...bleh - there I am. And printing it on yellow paper made it even worse! Oddly enough, the hardest part was picking a font that I would not normally use. I had narrowed it down to Mistral (horribly '80s and hard to read) or Stencil, and opted for Stencil just to be legible. And instead of writing the dates of this endeavor in small print in the margins, I then stenciled them in the center of the spread. And for a finishing touch, I scribbled all over with a greenish SpiderWriter pen. Here is the end result:

Art Journal: Opposites

The February theme for the Sketchbook Challenge is Opposites, and this journal spread started with two halves of the same face glued on opposite sides of the page, with a vague idea of doing something like "Good & Evil" or "Night & Day" or an evil twin.

If you watch a lot of BritLit TV, you may recognize Gillian Anderson as Lady Dedlock in the 2005 version of Bleak House. Inspired by Pam Carriker's Recycled Journal Pages workshop on the Strathmore website, the background is torn rice paper left over from my book arts' group's 2008 gelatin printing play date. Then I went over the whole thing with a thin layer of gesso, oil pastels & oil color pencils, Permapaque marker, and acrylic paint stenciled through punchinella or sequin waste.

Finally, I decided that declaring things to be opposite created false dichotomies, as these two women were actually the same person, so my spread about opposites ended up with the text "Two sides of the same coin."

Art Journal for Feb. 3, 4 & 7, 2011

Sketchbook Challenge: Highly Prized

The Sketchbook Challenge theme for January is "Highly Prized," chosen by Jill K. Berry (whom I was fortunate to take a workshop from in 2009). As part of my quest for inspiration, I'm also signed up for Strathmore's free on-line workshop "Recycled Journal Pages" taught by Pam Carriker, which explores among other things, using art you already have on hand in your journaling. In my on-going struggle to clean my office, I rediscovered a colored pencil sketch I made of my husband several years ago, and I collaged it into my art journal so it wouldn't get lost again!

At the time, I was on a serious colored pencil kick and working with Ann Kullberg's book Colored Pencil Portraits, but I learned I really don't have the patience for the medium. The problem with portraiture is that the facial recognition software in our brains is so precise that one slip of the pencil can turn a family member's face into a stranger's! That's why I tend to fall back on photography and vintage clip art for human imagery in my art. But I'm trying to get some more practice in this year. On those days when I realize around 9 p.m. that I haven't done my art journal entry, I pull out Mark Simon's Facial Expressions and sketch a few faces.

Lyric Kinard posted a tutorial video on drawing faces on the Sketchbook Challenge blog. She's doing 365 Faces this year. Now that's a challenge!