Happy Tuesday! Today I'm sharing an art journal spread I did while I was on vacation at the beach recently. I had packed a tote with my Dina Wakley paints & a few other supplies, along with my Media Journal, Scribble Sticks & some Collage Sayings, which ended up being a foundation for these pages.
I was inspired by the many shades of blue when I looked at the ocean... it was stunning, so I chose to work almost completely with blues for these pages (I didn't have ALL the Dina Wakley blues... but I've since ordered the ones I was missing! LOL.) You'll see on these pages: Sky, Turquoise, Lapis & Night together with Elephant & Mineral). I also used some modeling paste I had packed (similar to this one by Ranger) Washi Tape & a Glue Stick. I neglected to pack gel/multi medium and white paint, so that challenged me a bit... but I managed to make it work.
When I started I just knew I wanted to work with blues... so I just started to randomly apply blue paint to a page, overlapping and blending colors as I went. I had some stencils with me, so thought I would lift color off the background with a baby wipe afterwards (I had a mixed blue background, painted over it with elephant, then placed the stencil on top while it was still slightly wet and lifted color through the stencil with a baby wipe). I selected some sayings from the collage tissue and decided I would work with those on my pages, so placed them (not glued them!) on the first phase of my background before continuing on. Here's step one of the left page:
After filling in the circles, I painted around them with elephant to tie the pages together, then decided to add a circle to the left page to anchor the collage words I had chosen for that page. I added black outlines to my circles with a combination of Scribble Sticks and Stablio Water color pencil. I sketched my title 'healing' the same way, then went over it with a black alcohol marker to really make it pop. Details like washi tape and texture paste through the stencil were added to both pages.
I also decided to try my hand at sketching out a loose figure similar to the ones Dina draws. Because I had no white paint, I cut some book print in roughly the same shape and glued it down inside my figure, adding some shading with Scribble Sticks.
I finished with some 'scribbly journaling' which overlaps so it's more of a design element than being actually legible. I only had a chisel tip marker with me, so I'm not thrilled with my writing... as Dina says, "done is better than perfect" so I made it work. For me it was just a bit of therapy text about my journey of healing so far, since I was recently diagnosed with an auto-immune disease.
Another closer look at bits of my pages... the white shadows were done with Scribble Sticks.
I picked up a little paint with my dirty wet wipe to swipe a hint of color over my dried texture paste...
I hope you like my pages. It felt great to take time to just paint in my Media Journal without worrying too much about the end result (though hoping I'd be satisfied enough to be willing to share it!) and it was definitely part of my healing process, both being at the ocean and letting the beauty of it inspire me!
Inky (and painty) hugs,
Tara
Comments
Thanks!