Hello friends! I hope you are having a great weekend. Yesterday was a bit of an off-day for me, but today I feel good. And I’m determined to finally give my project Midori a new try. I’ve watched a ton of videos on YouTube and I think I’m ready. Before I head to my art room, I would like to share some art journal pages with you. I’ve mentioned the #sisterswithheartinart project on Instagram before and both these pages were made after their new prompts.
The first one was to make an entire page in 15 minutes. I am a slow worker, so this really was a challenge for me. I decided to use my A6 size journal, so my pages would be small enough to fill in an hour. I spread some paint with baby wipes. I love using them to layer a first coat of paint on my paper. You need a small amount of paint and the moist wipes makes it easy to spread the paint in a thin layer. It also works great for blending, which I did with a second colour. I started with bright yellow and added some orange from the edges towards the center. Thin layers speed up drying time, which is very usefull when only having 15 minutes to make a page. I used a stencil by The Crafters Workshop together with a make-up sponge and a red acrylic paint. At this point, I layed my journal aside to dry and moved on with the focal image. I drew a bunch of whimsical animals in Juliette Crane’s online workshop, which I scanned into my computer and printed out a several times, so I always have them at hand when I want to use them. They’re kind of my home made digital stamps now. I chose one of the animals and coloured it in with coloured pencils (Koh-i-Nor, not the best quality, but a good alternative when you can’t affor the fancy pencils by Prisma or Derwent). Usually I take my time for colouring, but time was not my friend with this project. Only 5 minutes to go. I quickly layered some colours on top of each other. Only 30 seconds to cut and adhere. I like to be very precise when I fussy cut an image, but there was no time for that, so I quickly cut around the image, leaving a small white border. I adhered it to the page using a glue stick. Times up! So…I cheated a bit and took another 30 seconds to write down some journaling.
I have to say this prompt was very educative for me. Normally I tend to overthink everything too much and you don’t have time for that with this prompt. I think it’s a good exercise for us overthinkers to practise every once and a while.
Another week’s prompt was to create a cartoonish owl. Those of you who know me for a while, know I am a big owl lover. No surprise I was very happy with this prompt. As a warm up, I started sketching some owls in my sketchbook.
I chose the top right owl for my project and decided to work in my watercolour journal. I made this journal as an insert for my Midori style Travelers Notebook, that I have yet to make. It’s A5 size. I had a lot of fun mixing and blending all the colours, even though my skills are pretty lousy. Well, you need to practice to get better, right. I used Van Gogh watercolours, which is a student grade. I won’t buy any fancy watercolours until my skills have improved enough to be worth artist grade paints. Sometimes I do treat myself to a new colour, but always the student grade. I must say these Van Gogh watercolours are pretty good quality.
When I was done painting and let the page dry overnight, I started to add some texture to the owl with some coloured pencils. Also I went over the lines with a black brush pen (Faber Castel) and gave him eyelids with a small tip fineliner (Micron). It looked nice, but it was too clean to my liking, so I added a couple of background stamps with Archival ink. Finally I marked a small border with a black inktense pencil and called it done.
I hope you enjoyed today’s post and see you back next time. Have a great day!
