Incorporating Drawings (Week of 3/5/2017)

 

For some reason, this week was rough as far as art went. I didn't do a whole lot of illustration, and I worked on a ton of pages in my art journal and didn't finish very many. I'm blaming it on spring break.

However, despite that being the case, I do have a couple of pages to share with you guys this week, and I hope you like them regardless.

The first page I have to share is probably one of my favorites. I wanted to do something very loose as far as a face was concerned, and I love the way this one turned out. I think incorporating neon pink into her face took some of the edge of perfection off.

She has an extra long neck and is sort of floating in space, but I like the effect that ultimately gives. I also got a bit of texture into her hair with black acrylic paint and rubbing a colored pencil over the top, though I'm not sure if I could recreate that if I tried. Maybe I'll have to give it a shot sometime.

It's only the second page in and I think you can probably see my experimentation with bright neon colors this week. I was working towards this a little bit last week; it's been bout a month since I've started art journaling again, and slowly but surely I think my style is starting to return to me.

I like bright colors and bold patterns and getting my thoughts out. Doodling inside of collaged shapes is something I've really been enjoying lately.

I actually polished off this page last night, though I'm not convinced that I'll never go back and add to it. Part of me wants to add some dark black outlines around the "flower" at the bottom of the page. But for now, I'm leaving it as is.

Underneath all of the layers of paint, there's a terrible drawing of a bottle of paint that was on my desk. I made it purposely bad, in pencil, and you can see some of the remnants of it peeking through the paint and collage and journaling. I was just trying to get some of my stress out, and this was my way of doing that. It sort of inspired the words I wrote going up the side.

It's not even that I don't consider abstract paintings or drawings art (I do!) but sometimes I get overwhelmed by the idea of everything needing to be perfect. It's an art journal and I was trying to get that feeling out of my system.

This final page is pretty busy, and has the potential to be added onto later as well. Preferably by adding some white paint and toning the whole thing down. However, this was also an attempt at getting myself to relax with my drawings, so I pretty much scribbled this figure in pen down onto the page. It was a nice change of pace to the structured "sketch first" approach I usually take.

The blue around the figure is actually a regular Crayola marker that I applied to the page on top of the paint. Because the paint was down, I was able to apply a wet brush to the marker and spread it into a vibrant watercolor look. I'm happy with that effect, if nothing else.

If you get anything out of this post, I hope you get that sometimes we just need to push through our art slumps. I feel like, for me, this especially applies to art journaling. I'm able to write out all of those "slump" emotions on the page and playing with paint typically tends to improve my mood.

I hope you all enjoyed looking at this week's art!