Emotion & Journaling (Week of 3/12/2017)

Hey guys, I'm back with another week's worth of pages, and this time around I get a little more deep and emotional with them.

 Art has always been my way of letting out my emotion and feelings, but this week especially that sensation has been multiplied by a hundred. I'm at the end of an art block I was experiencing (and still pushing myself through) and that left me with a lot of overwhelming feelings to get out of my system.

Almost all of my pages this week took a ton of layers to actually bring to completion (I think because I already overworked them a bit), but I managed to get things pulled together in a way that was manageable.

This is one of my favorite pages, though it is potentially the most chaotic. I had already dumped a bunch of layers onto this page when I started to work with the face. I used white paint mixed on a piece of plastic with water based markers; I wanted to see if I could make my own paint colors. As it turned out, it worked beautifully.

The actual face itself was a representation of how I was already feeling when I started to draw, and there is a substantial amount of journaling on this page, both legible and not. It was a lot of fun to just let go of the fear of creating and just put layer on top of layer.

I think that the finished page is fairly busy, but that's what I love about it. It's a rather accurate representation of how I was feeling.

This page was actually an attempt at being a bit more conscious with my journaling. I tend to overthink most things in my life, so forcing myself to just sit and think tends to be a fairly dangerous thing to do. I use the phrase "stuck in my own head" to describe this sensation.

However, this was a nice way of forcing myself past that; I allowed my mind to wander, my thoughts to reveal themselves, and then I dumped them on the page. It was a relief, and something I'd love to experiment with more in the future.

 

I apologize for the darkness of this full shot, but you can see the true colors better in the detail shots. I'm not quite sure if I'm finished with this page yet (considering some neon pink oil pastel), but I thought I'd share it regardless.

 I put the finishing touches of this page on this morning, and I find it amazing just how meditative all the doodling and paint layers can be. I'm starting to find my groove, and that's a nice feeling.

I also find that bright colors and abstract shapes make me happy.

The final page I have to share with you guys today is actually the first that I finished this week (but the furthest into my journal). This was the page that I think really pushed me out of the block I was feeling last week. I got caught up in this page and pretty much completed it from start to finish in one two or three hour evening sitting.

It's not my favorite face I've ever done, but I love the effects I was able to get with colored pencils, and how relaxing and soothing it was to work on.

I hope you all enjoyed seeing my pages from this week, and I'll see you all next week!

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!