Remember those vintage pipe cleaner, felt and styrofoam head figures peeps used to make? I found one at an estate sale and had to have it. It had big ole’ shoes, gloves and a pointed hat in felt, some sort of nose and a little tunic looking shirt over it’s upper body. Pretty hinky but full of old craft magazine memories. One day I was outside early and noticed that a ray of super bright sunshine was beaming down on our white shed and got the idea to shoot some shadows. There was Mr. Hinky Elf, in all his splendor. I think he made quite a silhouette, all long and lanky. So I shot him for awhile and a few other things and printed them out. When I sat down to make this page I was interested in texture and layered on many cancelled postage stamps and some small labels, etc. I also put a hand drawn womans face and my Shadow Man on there and then painted over it all several times with a credit card. Lots of texture, plus an odd focus image. My kind of page. This one is finished, I won’t put writing on it because I like it the way it is.
Archive for the ‘art journal’ Category
Long tall shadow art journal page
Posted: March 13, 2012 in art journalTags: altered book, art journaling, journaling, mixed media, new art work, painting, photography, shadows
All stamped up art journal page
Posted: March 10, 2012 in art journalTags: art journaling, new art work, rubber stamp, stamp
I believe I said earlier this week when presenting Albert the doll that when I say I have “a lot” of something it is likely to be an insane amount. Such is the case with this art journal page. More than a decade ago I procured a lot of stamps from Ebay and a box from a local used office supply shop. The stamps range in content from images for advertising to medicine to the Olympic games and a space shuttle mission. The text varies from “mixed nuts” to post office sayings to “import” and “export”. My goal was to see which of these antiquities still would print with a regular ink pad under normal conditions. Most of them did, leaving me with this busy page of black inked wonders. I topped the page off with one of my favorite poems by Mary Oliver printed off the Internet. I like this page with its random DADA meaninglessness, graphics printed in simple black ink and old style mid-last-century appearance.
Angel with dove art journal page
Posted: March 9, 2012 in art journal, photographyTags: art journaling, cemetery images, journaling, new art work, painting, photography
I took this picture of an angel holding a dove at a cemetery in Brooksville, FL. The statue was unique in my collection. I’ve been shooting graveyard images for 15+ years, all over the southeast US. The image was Photoshopped and the height of the statue gives it a kind of wonky orientation on the page (the statue was about 3 1/2-4′ tall). I printed the photo on regular copy paper and placed it on an otherwise prepared page. It looks like I used either pan watercolors or pan gouache to color the image. This page is in my altered map journal but has no journaling on it besides the “The bird leaves no trail” saying. I doubt that anything more will be done to this page in the future, I like it the way it is right now.
Paper mosaic dragonfly art journal page
Posted: March 6, 2012 in art journalTags: art journaling, journaling, mixed media, mosaic
The picture is a tad crooked because the altered map book journal I use is so big it hardly fits on the chair seat without falling off. Sorry about that. This page features one of my favorite processes which is paper mosaic. I like to use either colorful magazine pages or my own colored/textured surfaced papers. Can’t remember which this is, but it was watercolored over after gluing, I can see that.I think the orangy-red in the center might have been printed at one time with a styrofoam plate print and watercolor washed. This page doesn’t have any journaling yet. I usually work ahead visually in a book and then as the mood strikes to write I decide which page to use and try to find a pen that will actually print over top all the process work. Most likely that will be a Sharpie of some kind, or a white gel pen if the background is dark enough.
Three chicks art journal page
Posted: March 5, 2012 in art journalTags: art journaling, journaling, new art work, photography
I’m dedicating this post to my friends Elli and Soren. To Elli because she has a case of spring fever right now of epic proportions. And Soren loves googly eyes on everything and these chix have pretty close to googly eyes going, without actually googly-ing. The journal part is above, written in white gel pen. I found these chicks at the drug store after Easter last year and have them sitting on my kitchen windowsill. They are bright and cheerful and we have extremely interesting conversations while I do the dishes. Nothing I can share here, you understand. Spring has Sprung!
Day of the Dragonfly
Posted: February 28, 2012 in art journalTags: altered book, art journaling, journaling, mixed media, new art work, stamp, stitching
Last summer we had epic rain which resulted in the spawn of mosquito larvae on our flat roof which was holding puddles of water. About this time, dragonflies reached all time highs in populations and record breaking sizes and colors. I even saw a rare for this area bright red dragonfly; most of them here are an iridescent greenish-blue or brown. It was not unusual to see dragonflies last summer the size of birds, and in packs of 50+ swarming the backyard. If I had an ounce less of dragonfly love it would have been positively creepy and The Mist-y. I commemorated one dragonfly filled day with this journal page. I have a ginormous dragonfly stamp and did a lot of coloring with marker over top of already pretty scrapbooking paper. Patterns and lines were made using a white gel pen and I found a cute tree frog in a magazine to paste onto a wing looking like he was getting a free ride. Whee! I sewed around the edge of the page when it was finished with a blanket stitch. I love this page because it reminds me of a real day in the backyard enjoying nature and because of all the summer colors in it.
Fierce with reality
Posted: February 25, 2012 in art journalTags: art journaling, journaling, new art work, pen/ink drawing, terry lee getz
Sometimes a journal page is nearly an excuse to document a quote. Or it can seem that way, unless you do something, anything, to showcase the quote in a new setting. For some reason that I do not begin to remember, I decided to make this quote into a turban like headdress and do a partial portrait of a wise woman beneath it. The quote is by Florida Scott-Maxwell, who I am not familiar with nor had I heard this quote before but I loved it immediately and wanted to save it to refer back to. I ended up loving this page even tho it is a bit sparse. There is so much to think about in the quote I did not really want to distract from that thought by putting in a bunch of color or textures or patterns. This is pastel chalk directly onto a naked white journal page, no special paper, no gesso. Just a sharpie, white page and a tad of planning–not much, though. I wanted the page to remain fresh when I view it. As a side note, I also see in this page which was done months ago, an interest in more white space which is on my mind these days when I make art. Not that you’d really notice a change yet…still in the percolating stage.
Crow on a wire at twilight
Posted: February 24, 2012 in art journalTags: art journaling, new art work, painted canvas, painting
Although this piece is on canvas board I consider it an art journal piece. The canvas had an image on it that did not work out and I began to play around from scratch over top of it. The crow kind of materialized out of the darker paint I was using to cover the previous work. I believe there is metallic paint in several colors on the crow and the rest of the color is regular acrylic. A white pen was used to journal a shrine-like shape around the bird. I love crows although I find them hard to render unless I am stamping them in black ink in a really graphic way. All that dark can make definition hard to achieve to separate areas of the body and face. I “solved” the problem somewhat in this piece by doing some sweeping lines with the white pen, which gave the bird some personality and unified the body of the bird with the rest of the piece. Certainly not my favorite piece, nor best created, but I did resolve the problem of a canvas that was not working at all and turned this into a decent journal page. I will copy it and paste it into my altered map journal one of these days.
“To listen is to lean in, softly…
Posted: February 23, 2012 in art journalTags: altered book, art journaling, found images, journaling, mapmaking, maps, mixed media
with a willingness to be changed by what we hear”-Mark Nepo. This is a page from my altered map book journal. The page started with a black and white copy of a map I made of my hand, then collage elements and a rough border were laid in on top of the illustration. Watercolor provides a unifying burnt yellow and the quote, shrine and bird pictures are all from magazines or junk mail. This is the first page in this book and I covered it for protection with an old piece of brown wax paper which was pulled back for the photo. I like using evocative quotes culled from reading material and already printed, ready to glue into the page. I also rubber stamp and hand write quotes that seem appropriate for the day that aren’t pre-printed. I believe this is the second page I’ve shared from this altered map journal, I continue to work into it frequently but it takes time to move through it because everything has to dry properly before moving on.
Crickyn 