Colour Blast - Orange

It's sad to think that this Colour Blast collaboration is now over. I really loved getting each journal when it was at a different stage, from being the first to add to Vanessa's Grey journal to being the last to add to Julia's Orange. We only have our competed original journals left to share.

 I added this drawing and mantra onto a background that was already in the journal. I'm assuming it was made by Julia. I love these inky backgrounds she makes, so I didn't want to totally cover it. 

I sketched some tiger lilies a few years ago and when I found the drawings, I made copies to use. Here I transferred the image onto a piece of tissue paper I had glued into the journal. 

I was so happy when Julia picked orange as her color. Along with yellow, orange is a happy color for me, but one with extra depth. I also consider it a brave color to use. 

This spread I made for Julia and her Fox spirit!

I still had Julia's journal when we had the solar eclipse in North America. While I wasn't near totality here in New York, I thought id be interesting to capture how the sun looked at a certain time on that day. I'll always remember how the sun glowed. 

I also love that on the last page, we all added which month we worked in the journal. What a great to close it out.  I can't wait to see how everyone's final pages before we share our own completed journals. Please check out everyone else's pages: Julia, Vanessa, Lauren, Riet, Moriah and Lauren.

Colour Blast - Yellow

I've always loved yellow. It started as my go to "pick me up" color, and has become a staple in my palette. And working in Riet's journal made me love it all the more.

I've really come to enjoy using this technique for using up my scraps. Especially scraps of hand painted paper. Though simple, it definitely adds a lot of energy. 

Days, weeks, and now months after I made this spread I still scroll back into my camera roll to look at this spread. It's has to be one of the spreads that I'm most happy with. Everything just flowed while making this one. 

I had three bottles of yellow paint laying on my desk and decide to swatch them all! Yellow is really lovely and fun. 

I'm  always looking up color/emotion associations. So I paired them with a photo I had taken at the New York Botanical Gardens. 

  

We're getting to end of our Colour Blast journey. Most of the journals have completed the circle and we have just one more color to share. Be sure to check out all the other additions added this round by Vanessa, Riet, Lauren Brown, Lauren Blood, Moriah, and Julia. 

Get Messy Art 101 - Week 2

This week was about texture. And I'm proud of myself for actually taking the time to notice new textures around me. My favorite thing I found was actually a piece of packaging in some junk mail. It was this really plasticy styrofoam that I used to stamp the silver paint with.

The yellow paint definitely dictated the colors of this, since it was sprayed first over texture paste. I used textured paper, thread, foil, and stamping to create different textures. I also like the slight dimension achieved from using the bubble mailer. 

For this season's art journal, I've settled on a color scheme. I'm just loving how they all go together at the moment and how minimal it's looking right now. 

Get Messy Art 101 - Week 1

This new Get Messy season is all about changes for me. I'll be posting my Get Messy Habit on Sundays, so I have time to work through all the extra prompts that we are getting now. Also I'm mainly working on a large 22"x30" piece of watercolor paper and I want to give myself time to complete whatever that turns out to be.

Towards the end of this week, I did miss working in a journal, so I grabbed one I had made a few months ago and I'll be using that as well.

The first week's theme was all about watercolor. So I used watercolor, gouache and paint pens on this piece. I had no plan or idea of where this would go when I started working on it. This definitely evolved over the week and I just kept adding to it everyday until I thought it was done.

 

As for my journal I just made one quick spread that I really love. It may be my favorite one yet. I made a watercolor color chart last weekend and ever since, I've been obsessed with color swatches. I need to remember that and make them a go to element in my work. 

I've had a set of gouache for a while, but never gotten around to using it. I was actually thinking of adding it to my purge pile when we got a prompt to use gouache to paint faces. It was fun to make these but I need to work more with gouache to figure out the proper consistency. I tend to add to much water at this point. 

I'm really looking forward to getting started on my next 22"x30". Can't wait to see what prompts and tutorials next week brings!

How I'm Doing: The Minimalist Art Journal

The Minimalist Art Journal course has quickly become one of my favorites now. When Caylee first mentioned it was coming, I was interested because it's so far from what I consider my spreads to be. But I was also very interested because it launched during the Christmas season, and with it's focus on expressing with less, I thought it would be perfect to try. I used a journal I had bought from Vanessa's Esty store, as it had a great floral cover and a mix of papers. I ended up taking the binding apart to add a few extra pages. I love the pages I've made so far as it's great to just let a page be.