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!

Faces and Bright Colors (Week of 2/26/2017)

 I have quite a few pages that I ended up putting the finishing touches on this week (there are even a few that didn't make it to this post), and I'm super excited to share these ones. i feel as though I'm starting to fall into a little bit of a style after adjusting to familiarizing myself with art journaling once again.

With this first page, this was a page I had been wrestling with pretty much since I started the journal. Nothing wanted to work with me, so I eventually ended up painting over most of it in white and blending some purple into it. The blue on the left hand side of the page were some spray inks that bled up through, and the circles from a scrap of paper put the finishing touches on.

This is one of my favorite spreads in the entire journal.

Even though it isn't technically a two page spread, I like the way the two pages look sitting next to each other. I like the consistent theme of the color purple (one of my favorite colors for artwork) and the graphic doodling/collage elements that I incorporated.

The face on the right hand page is actually a face I had drawn with alcohol markers in one of my sketchbooks, and I scanned it to use as a collage element (the body is mostly painted in on this page).

This is another one of the more interesting spreads in my journal, in my opinion, and I absolutely adore the bright colors.

I've been experimenting a bit with using journaling as a design element, as well as contrasting black with super bright and exciting colors. I've also been playing with cutting out graphic, blocky shapes and collaging them in. It's a lot of fun and a good way to get myself to just relax.

 Here are a couple of close-ups of the details of this spread.

On the left, you can see that I put in a lot of detail and doodling with a ballpoint pen, which was a lot of fun. Ballpoint pens write over top of acrylic paint beautifully, in adition to being cheap. I don't feel precious about the supplies I'm using, which is a nice bonus.

On the right, you can see a close up of a couple of little houses I cut and pasted from another photocopy of my work. I had done a "collage sheet" a while back with purple watercolor and doodled on top of it with a Sharpie. I love using bits of the photocopies in my artwork.

For this face, I only had one idea in mind; I wanted to try to use primarily black and white for the shading.

I used a Portfolio water-soluble oil pastel in black to outline my shapes, then I diluted it to create the shadows. I also added a little bit of the neon pink oil past to this girl's cheeks to give her a bit of character. I'm super exciting to photocopy this one, I think it will be fun to incorporate into other pages.

This is one of those pages that I'm a little on the fence about. I absolutely love the doodling on it, but I almost feel like it's a little too busy. However, I've officially called it on this one, and I'm not planning on adding anything else to it. That doesn't mean that I never will, but for now, I'm satisfied with it.

The doodling around the title was super relaxing to do, and I never felt like it needed to be particularly perfect, which was really nice. I'm also liking the color palette of pink, yellow and blue contrasting with the almost harsh black. 

I need to stamp with bubble wrap more often, because the visual texture I achieved with it was great. 

For the final page I have to share with you guys today, we have a sort of doodled, bright colored, confusing page. I had some ideas that I wanted to experiment with (using gouache, testing a pattern for a stamp I wanted to make, cut out shapes) and I knew that I wanted to use bright colors, since I think that's really been helping with my mood lately. 

The result isn't super cohesive, but I think I like it regardless.

I've been having a lot of fun playing with cutting out shapes from scraps of paper I've cleaned my brushes on. The results are always sporadic and interesting, giving me something that I never could have planned if I tried.

I hope you guys enjoyed looking at these pages, and I'll see you next week!

A Smattering of Pages (Week of 2/19/2017)

Last week, I posted on Sunday, today I'm posting on Saturday. I'm not sure where the routine is going to fall, but I finished a ton of pages this week (even more than I'm going to show in this post), so I figured I'd write this post up before it got out of hand.

The first bit I have to share with you is actually only a piece of a page. I was wrestling with this page for weeks, adding here and there, doodling and painting over and doodling again. I finally think that I've gotten it to a place where I'm happy to at least leave it alone, and this little bit of journaling and the title feel extremely accurate right about now.

The next page is a lot brighter than the last one, and I used a shimmery blue paint that I've been hoarding practically since I got it. In the end, I'm glad that I did because I think it adds an extra element of interest to the page.

With the title and journaling of this page, my secret (or not so secret) emo self is making an appearance. This is also a continuation of the page with tissue paper laid down from this post.

Now here's something a little new, at least for this journal; faces. I didn't know if I wanted to create more mixed media faces in this journal or not, despite the fact that I've done it a lot in the past. However, this just sort of happened, and I'm more than glad that it did. I love the way the two pages of this spread sort of contrast but blend into each other at the same time.

In the first photo, you can see some of the details of the left hand page. I don't use colored pencils in my art journals a lot, but I wanted to see what Crayola pencils were like to work with on top of acrylic paint. As it turns out, the result is a lot of fun. With this face, I also had a lot of fun just trying to relax about proportions of the face - it's off and I know it. I'm okay with that.

In the second photo, there is a close up of the right hand page. I've been wrestling with this page for a long while as well, and I love the place I finally managed to get it to. I didn't mean to make a point when I started creating this page, but it seemed to have happened regardless. This also inspired (ever so vaguely) a watercolor piece, and I feel like this page might evolve into yet another finished piece. We'll see.

Now, this may be my favorite (or one of my favorite) pages in this journal thus far. I like the graphic nature of it, I think it's bold, and I like the face that I drew (I used a ballpoint pen). I also love the meaning behind this page.

All of that texture in the background? That was my handwriting. I was having a really tough time when I created this page, and I felt like all of my nerves were ON. I just wrote and wrote and wrote, all about how I was feeling, and by the time I had finished writing, I felt a whole lot better. These are the times that I regret the break I took from art journaling - it really is a form of stress relief for me.

The final page I'm going to leave you all with today is yet another one of my favorites. I knew that I wanted to do some wonky little houses, and I've set some goals for myself as far as using up the supplies I have before buying more. As a result, I decided to cut out bits of paper to collage down to create the shapes of the houses and the moon.

This is done in a super quirky style, and was in no way meant to be realistic. The doodling was done with Sharpie, so fine detail went out the window. It was nice to not have to worry about it, and I love the way the page turned out in the end!

I hope you all enjoyed seeing what I've been up to this week, and I'll see you next time!

Textures and WIPs (Week of 2/13/2017)

For several reasons that have come to my attention recently, I thought it would be nice to start a blog in order to share some of my mixed media projects!

I'm Jordan, I'm 20 years old, and I've recently been extremely interested in illustration. You can see my work on my Instagram here. However, in an attempt to relax in the realm of my artwork, I've recently taken up art journaling once more. Years ago I was extremely involved in the community (I think it was 2011? Or thereabouts) but only recently have I become involved once more. I joined Get Messy, and this is the Art 101 season, which I've been having a lot of fun with. I'm here to share my texture pages from this week.

First and foremost, this is a rather simplistic page in comparison to a lot of the work that I typically do. It's near the front of my new art journal (that I made especially for Art 101), and deals with a few things that have been more emotional for me.

The pages of this book were created from watercolor experiments (which was the first week of Art 101), and that shows through in the background of this page.

This page is a little more representational of the type of work that I typically do. I tend to skip around in my journals quite a bit, but as of right now I'm calling the left hand page complete.

A close up of some of the texture on the page above. This is one of my favorite little parts of this page; the colors and textures and doodling all work together in a way that is extremely aesthetically pleasing to me. I also like the dots of my end paper showing through. 

This is another texture that I was playing with, and the work in progress page it is a part of can be seen above. This is a piece of tissue paper that I crumpled up before sticking it down with Mod Podge. I made a conscious attempt to make sure the wrinkles showed up in the dry piece. I still need to add more to this page, but since it's related to the theme of texture, I thought I'd share.

The final page I want to share is this one; it's rather graphic and vibrant, which I like, and it incorporates a lot of collage elements. I consider this page complete as well, though I'm not convinced that I'll never add anything more to it (some journaling might be in order).

I leave you today with a close of detail shot of some of the textures and doodling on this page; it feels really nice to be back into art journaling after so long and I'm excited to see what the future holds for me and my art!