Documented Life Project (DLP) Week 3: Color Wheel

The prompts for DLP come out each Saturday around noon.  I had planned to put off doing my page/spread until later in the week but it called to me yesterday.  These were the themes/prompts for the Documented Life Project week three:

January Theme
The Blank Page and How to Face It!
January 17
Art Challenge:  The Color Wheel
Journal Prompt:  “I found I could say things with color and shapes that I couldn’t say any other way . . . “    – Georgia O’Keeffe

While searching for something else yesterday I came across an individual piece of mixed media paper, slightly larger than the size of the large Dylusions journal in which I am creating my DLP spreads.  It had papers and paint on it where I had started something a year ago but had not continued.  I decided that the colors were perfect for a color wheel (burgundy, magenta, teal, yellowish green, yellow with coordinating papers).  I started by spreading white gesso around the papers with a palette knife to integrate them with the background.  I scribbled into the wettish gesso with a pencil, leaving several marks that I hoped would peek up through the layers. Then I smeared more fluid acrylics in the same colors with my fingers and through two StencilGirl stencils (‘Angel Circle’ by Kate Thomspon and ‘Spider Flower by Terri Stegmiller). I adhered the Georgia O’Keeffe quote printed onto deli paper onto the top left side and finished by adding sketchy embellishments with a black Fude pen, a black Stabilo Marks All pencil and various Posca paint pens.

In the photos below you can see the details of the painting, showing the pencil marks and different layers peeking up through from the original paper.

For the second week in a row I worked fairly intuitively (no plan at the outset for where the page would go) and for the second week in a row I created a grunge-style painting.  I didn’t intend to do that but I am really liking the messy, colorful results of this intuitive experimenting I am doing.  I wonder where next week will take me?  We’ll see.

I had fun creating this and will continue on with more art journaling later today.  I hope your holiday is full of creativity also.  Happy Martin Luther King Day!

Advertisement

2 for 1 Fun ….

Today I did two pages in my holiday art journal.  That’s not exactly true.  I finished a page that I began a few days ago; I did a quickie collage page; and I started (but did not finish) another page that contains a lot of drawing.  Here are the two pages I finished today.

A few days ago, I posted this painted background with just a sketch of the uppermost cat. At the time I had no idea where the page was going.  Last night I had an idea for the words on the page: “We wish you a merry Catmas” . . . except when I said it out loud in my head it came out “We wish you a Merry Catmouse.”  Perfect!  I couldn’t pass that up so I went with it.  The cats and mice were sketched with a pencil and outlined with a black china marker.  The lettering and all of the details were done with a Posca paint pen in white and a black Fude ball pen.  This page makes me smile.

Yesterday I added the red & white washi tape to the inside of one of the cereal boxes I used in creating my holiday journal.  Today while thinking of whether or not to paint this page, I saw a piece of Tim Holtz scrapbook paper that had old-fashioned alphabet blocks on it.  I thought they would look perfect directly on the cardboard itself.  Since there were only one of each letter of the alphabet, I decided on the phrase ‘kid toys’.  Once that was decided on, I looked for something in my stash that was related.  I found a roll of vintage bingo cards and cut one to use as the center background.  I also cut out the letter blocks and collaged all onto the page.  I then used Crayola crayons to outline the letter blocks and, finally, I drew the baseball and jack.  I like how the page came out.  It takes me back to my childhood in the 50’s when all of those items were popular.

These pages were fun but now I have housework to do.  I’ll be back, maybe tomorrow, with more creative play in my holiday art journal.  I hope you make time today, too, for some creative fun!

Hope is the thing…

Today Dawn DeVries Sokol put out her second set of prompts for the 12.31 holiday art journal workshop. Every Tuesday and Friday she gives a thought prompt as well as a word of the day, a quote of the day, a song of the day and a suggested visual focus for your page.  None of these are required.  The prompts are there to provide inspiration for your holiday art journaling, if you need them.  If you are interested in finding out more about her free 12.31 workshop, you can find it here:  http://www.dawnsokol.com/1231/ .

The only prompt that called to me today was her visual focus which was to create a shape on the page using torn bits and pieces of paper and then to doodle and/or journal on or around the shape.  I already had a tall and narrow piece of red scrapbook paper as a page in the journal so I decided to use that as the base.  My first thought was to create a cross, which I did.  But that cross morphed into the shape of a Christmas star so I decided to go with that. The shape of the Christmas star reminded me a little of a tree so I drew a bird on one of the branches (rays).  I doodled and collaged scalloped shapes around the bottom and sides of the page and then doodled over the star.  I wrote the word HOPE on top of the scallops at the bottom of the page. I’m not sure where that came from, but it seemed to fit. Then I doodled small white and black stars on the background to mirror the large one.   I used Posca paint pens, a Fude ball pen in black,  and a white Signo Broad pen for all of my doodling.

As I was looking over the page, the word HOPE and the bird came together in my mind and I journaled the first verse of Emily Dickinson’s poem “Hope Is the Thing With Feathers” in the center of the bottom scallops.  For those who are unfamiliar with that poem it reads:

Hope is the thing with feathers

By Emily Dickinson

Hope is the thing with feathers  
That perches in the soul,  
And sings the tune without the words,  
And never stops at all,  
   
And sweetest in the gale is heard;          
And sore must be the storm  
That could abash the little bird  
That kept so many warm.  
   
I’ve heard it in the chillest land,  
And on the strangest sea;         
Yet, never, in extremity,  
It asked a crumb of me.

I rather like my patchwork Christmas star/cross and its association with Emily Dickinson’s poem.  Christmas (the birth of Christ) is, after all, associated with hope in the hearts of many.

This was an interesting creative exercise, pulling almost everything from some source inside that had nothing to do with planning or thought.  I love that about creativity.  It has much to do with intuition and process and less to do with the end product.

I hope you find some time in your day to creatively express your own intuition!

31 Days Has December…

It’s been about a week since I blogged last. I got sick with either whopping allergies or a cold two days before Thanksgiving.  Cleaning the house, preparing the feast, and then cleaning everything up afterward took a toll on my energy and I am finally beginning to feel myself again.  And just in time too!

December is here and it has 31 days in which to create.  The late fall is full of fun and a flurry of family activities. One of the activities I decided to do this year is to keep a holiday art journal.  I feel no pressure to work in it every day or to finish a page each day, but I do want to get in the holiday mood and sustain some form of creativity for the next 4 weeks.  I plan to loosely follow prompts given in a free “12.31” holiday journal workshop sponsored by Dawn DeVries Sokol, the same person who does NaNoJouMo during November.  If you’re interested you can find it here:  http://www.dawnsokol.com/1231/ .

I decided to create my own journal out of cereal and cracker boxes using a technique that Dawn teaches in a workshop on Creativebug.com .  I used two cereal boxes, two cracker boxes, a greeting card and four pieces of heavy scrapbook paper/cardstock.  I will gesso and paint or otherwise decorate each page as I use it.  Yesterday (December 1st) I started putting the journal together and today I finished the journal and decorated the cover for it.

You can see that the boxes, cards, and papers I used are different sizes.  That’s A-okay for what I will be doing.  I’m happy to re-cycle items I would otherwise throw out.

Along the right edge I deckle-cut each of the boxes to give them a little more interest.

After binding all of the pages together with a needle and twine, I covered the outside spine in decorative duct tape.  I decorated the cover page with gesso, Dylusions sprays, Posca paint pens and a white gel pen.  The two snow-people are made from circles that I had painted as an exercise in a watercolor workshop a few months ago.  I kept those exercise papers just in case I wanted to use bits and pieces as collage in my art journal.  Again, re-use & recycle.

I have no idea what this journal will look like at the end of December, but I’m pretty sure I will have fun working in it.  I hope you also find something fun and creative to do during this last month of 2014!

Art Every Day Month – Day 14

Some days what you see in your mind does not translate to the page.  Today is one of those days.  The NaNoJouMo song-title prompt for the day was “Suit and Tie” by Justin Timberlake.  I wanted a dapper man in suit and tie and the words “I be on my suit and tie” as well as another line from the lyrics “Let me show you a few things”.

Well, I did find a magazine photo of a man in a suit which was the correct size for the page but the black inks of the image were more charcoal gray than the glossy black I had envisioned.  I wanted to create a background that had Payne’s gray (almost a charcoal navy color) and a turquoise green to offset the black of the image.  I created the background using acrylic paints and a stencil. It looked fine on its own but I wasn’t sure at first how to write over the top of the stenciled parts.  I used Posca paint pens in black and green and simply wrote over the top of the stenciled parts . . . but, unfortunately, the writing didn’t show up very well.  And the image of the man didn’t show up well against the background so I used a green oil pastel and a black paint pen to outline the image, which did help a little.  I also did some doodling on the page to help integrate the background colors a bit.  Here’s what I ended up with.

I’m not wild about the finished journal page but every time I do something that doesn’t work, I learn something from it:  either what not to do in the future or what I can do to fix it.

Also, I realized that I really don’t like following the NaNoJouMo prompts much.  I’d rather come up with my own inspiration and create that.  So, although I may use the prompts now and again, I think I’ll just follow my own heART for the rest of the month and do what calls to me.

May your own muse call to you to do something creative today also!