So I had some left over paint.... (and some words about the Canson Mixed Media XL Book)

I'm working on a new handmade book and it's going to be very colourful. It's also going to be a while before I have anything worth showing about it, because it's quite a lot of work and I'm nowhere near done. I will keep you posted in time though of course.

However sometimes one project can lead to others and that's what today's post is about. See before putting the signatures together I painted the papers with acrylic and then when I was done with that I had some paint left over. Sometimes I will use that to print papers with or just to fill up a sketchbook page. This time I decided to put the left over paint in this yet unused Canson Mixed Media book that I had. I bought it because it's huge and because it claimed to be full of mixed media paper. More about that later.

Once I filled two pages with the left over paint I just couldn't resist getting straight to work with them and here's what happened: two mixed media pages full of fun and colour! I'm showing you the full pages and some detail shots as well.

I so enjoy putting all sorts of supplies together on a page! For these pages I used acrylic paint, decorative papers, several stencils, gouache, paint pens, stabilo all pencils, wall paper clippings, drawing pens, glaze pens, coloured pencils, baby wipes, brush markers and probably at least a dozen other things. They really make me happy.

What didn't make me happy however is the Canson Mixed Media  XL Book. Sigh, the paper just sucks and is not fit for wet media at all. I think the only way I will be able to use it in the future is to prep all the pages with gesso before using it, but really, a paper for wet media should just be able to... take wet media without any hassle! I will not get in too much detail about it, but just refer you to a review by Roz Stendahl on her blog that I wish I had read before I had bought it. Just check here if you're interested. All I can say is don't buy this book if you actually want to do mixed media in it. I think it might be fine for drawing, though I haven't tried that yet.

I will probably keep using it by prepping it with gesso as it is a wonderful size (I have the 11x14 inch one) and gesso is the great equalizer after all. Still...another lesson learned: check for reviews before buying a new to you sketchbook online! :-(

Wishing you all a wonderful and artsy Wednesday!

Watercolour nonsense

I like watercolour and I like doodling, so it's to be expected that I also like doodling with watercolour. I usually call this nonsense 'watercolour nonsense', because it's just play with no need for anything but to be play. That of course in itself is not nonsense at all. I really believe it's good for you and it's fun too. The following pages come from the watercolour sketchbook, the same one that I used for my London pages and that is now almost full.

As you can see most of these are about making patterns and playing with colours and shapes. I often do these on my lunch break at work. It relaxes me and it helps me do at least a little art on my work days. Nothing like a bit of nonsense to lift the creative spirit, haha!

Wishing you all a wonderful and artsy week!

Photography Friday

Sometimes the beach  and the sky above it are so beautiful that all I can do is just take picture after picture after picture. This was the case a short while ago when there were amazing clouds, light and reflections to behold. So this Photography Friday is all about the beach on the early morning of a cloudy day. Enjoy!

Can you believe that light? Sometimes the filters on my smart phone app can change the colours a little, but this time it really was just like that. I could just look at these pictures forever and ever.  Sigh... ;-)

Wishing you all a wonderful and artsy weekend!

Book review - Art Journal Freedom / Dina Wakley

Title: Art Journal Freedom - How to Journal Creatively with Color & Composition
Author: Dina Wakley
Info: 128 p. - 2013
Rating: 8 / 10






Notes: 
I'm a collector of art journal books. I keep buying them and I keep loving them. I mostly buy  and love them for the pretty pictures and new work of sometimes also new to me artists and because in general the tone of these books always inspires me to get back to making stuff.

I no longer always expect the content to be new to me too. A lot of art journaling books pretty much deal with the same things. That's okay in itself, since a lot of people who buy them are new to the genre, but if you're an experienced art journaler and you are looking for new things it gets harder and harder to find something to fulfill your curiosity. So when somebody finally finds a new angle to tackle in an art journaling book I am very pleased indeed.

Dina Wakley managed to do just that in her Art Journal Freedom. Her angle is 'composition' as in the lay out, colours and make up of the pages you do. How do you get interesting effects? What does colour do to your overall image? Do you have one focal image or more? What can black and white do for you? What about empty spaces? The list goes on and on and she seems pretty thorough in her coverage of the subject.

Thorough, but not too theoretical. She keeps it light and easy to follow and gives tons of examples through her own (fabulous) work. She also gives a lot of assignments and (a true art journaler at heart) examples of how to break the 'rules'.

The point of this book seems not to be to show you how to do your compositions (there is no wrong and right way to art journaling after all), but to give you options, broaden your horizons and leave room for new approaches.

I think this book would especially be good for people who are not pleased with the lay out of their pages but don't know why. Some of us are born with a natural aptitude for seeing the most balanced way to position elements of a page or to combine colours, some of us could use a little guidance with that and this book is perfect for them. I think it could also be helpful for those who are stuck on a page or feel they have already ruined it.

Even if you're an experienced art journaler this book may get you to thinking as to why you do things a certain way and if maybe there are alternatives you could try. A challenge for me for instance is the use of white space. I have a tendency to fill everything up to the brim, but I can see from examples of other people's work how beautiful a white space can sometimes be. I could set a challenge to myself and try to do some pages with more white in them.

If you are not interested in composition or colour use, but you do like Dina's style, well then you should still get this book, because it is full of eye candy and some explanation of her process. This is obviously not one of those artists who is stingy in sharing what she knows and does. I like that!

Conclusion: wonderful book! ;-)

Printing up a storm

For the longest time I have been using paper palets when working with acrylic paints. They are handy and don't require cleaning. They are also nice and flat and I have come to make a habit of using this trait for some impromptu printing on scraps of paper while I'm painting something else. By that I mean that I will use left over paint on the palet,  sometimes spread it out with a brush, make some marks in it and then lay a piece of paper over it and it prints the pattern on to the paper. The results can look like this:

It's fun and it's a great way to not let any paint go to waste.

A thing I had never done though so far was use this simple technique on purpose just for a session of printing papers. So that's what I decided to do this weekend. I wanted a slightly bigger surface than my paper palet to work with, but I figured anything flat would do. Now it just so happens that in my job I often have to file reports and stuff and they always have these acetate covers that don't go into the files but get tossed. Instead of tossing them I sometimes take a bunch of them home, because as we all know, mixed media artists can make use of everything. ;-) I thought this time they would make a wonderful flat surface for my printing. And so they did (I only used one for the entire session and it worked fine).

Here's the result or the first batch, done in acrylics:

Now are these cool or what? I couldn't believe it myself. Of course these are the result of several layers on top of each other. Now, I'd explain the process to you, but nothing is so original or somebody else has already done it and this time I'll just refer you to the wonderful Jennibellie, who did a video on what she calls faux gel printing (for those of us who don't have access to an actual gelli printing plate). It's basically the same thing. I used some different techniques for making marks and structures and of course used acetate as my surface instead of a craft mat, but the principle is exactly the same.  You can find the vid here.

Some things I did for structures/patterns:

• Draw into the paint with a palet knive (it leaves thicker lines than a cocktail stick or the back of a brush).
• Use the brayer to make patterns.
• Cut another piece of acetate into strips or rectangles or other shapes and use these as masks for your print. 
• Use a comb or fork or whatever to draw repetitive lines across the surface. I used a special structure comb for paint, but really that's not necessary, use what you have. If you go over it again sideways you get structures like the one on the bottom right. I fell in love with that one. 
• There's no reason you can't print/stamp on top of your prints. I used the masks as stamps for instance, but you could also use caps of bottles, toilet rolls or just regular stamps.
• Print only part of the paper. Lay the paper on the acetate sideways or at an angle. 
• Do ghost prints. After you did your first print, spritz the surface with water and print again. 
• Layer, layer, layer. The first prints looked like rubbish really, but when you layer several rubbish prints on top of each other, you get some very interesting effects. 
• Print through stencils. The stencil serves as a mask and leaves a pattern on the paper.

After being so happy with the above acrylic prints I started to wonder what would happen if I spritzed the acetate with some spray inks and printed those. Well...this:

Oooh, I know! These are Dylusions spray inks. I only have a few colours, but they are my favorite colours and I love how these came out. The ones where you can see an alphabet or stars and honeyrates showing through is where afterwards I took a stencil and a babywhipe and wiped through the stencil. Because the ink is watersoluble you pick it up again and it leaves this ghostly mark of the pattern. Really nice.

There's not much to this technique really. Just spray to your liking on the acetate, maybe make some marks in it (although of course ink is much less easy to manipulate because it's so much more fluid) and print away.

One thing I did take from Jennibellie is to put a big piece of paper under my working surface and make sure I used it to clean my brayer and stencils and  mark making stuff (I even sometimes printed directly on it with the left over paint on the acetate sheet). It left a very saturated colourful surface at the end of my session that I cut up into smaller pieces. Here's what I wound up with: 

So even your worksurface can give you pretty papers! See how nothing goes to waste here? I love that!
I can tell you I was one very happy artsy girl at the end of this afternoon of printing. A very happy artsy girl with paint all over her that is. ;-)

Well, I hope this post gives you some ideas to do your own printing and also makes you realize you don't really need anything fancy to do some printing. Use what you have, experiment and see what happens. Enjoy!

Wishing you all a wonderful and artsy week!