New post on my other blog!

Tags

collage, flower collage, Mixed Media, Sunflower, Zentangle Inspired Art, ZIA

I have submitted a collage to an upcoming exhibit. See the details on my professional blog Jeanette Clawson Art.

I hope you have a beautiful day.

 

I Love Spring

Tags

acrylic paint, art journal, Art Journal Every Day, collage, flower, Mixed Media, Mixed-media art journal, Spring

Gratitude usually abounds for me in the spring. I love spring flowers. I love spring candy (even if I can’t eat it anymore) and I even love spring rain. Here are the pages from my last week or so. I’ve been painting a lot – both the small paintings and the backgrounds of pages in this journal so you will see more cohesive and intentional painting in the next few gratitude journal posts. The 50 small paintings book is due back at the library tomorrow so I’m going to hit the paint while I have it. I’m pretty sure I’m going to get it again to do justice to a few of the more complicated pictures I want to paint.

Some of this is progress on the community mandala, some is my 2 (fairly) new yoga classes that I am loving!!!! I’m trying to make to do lists again. I got away from them for a while but I love making and checking them and seeing them in my journal pages. Lots of green writing because I love green and life is so green and fecund these days. Breathe it in!

Coloring and Painting with Friends

Tags

acrylic paint, art, art journal, color mixing, gratitude, gratitude journal, Mixed Media, painting

I’m taking a Process Painting class that inspired the background of this gratitude journal background. The circles on the left are from a coloring page I worked on with a young friend and his parents. The birds are one of my favorite stamps. It has a lot of fine lines and rarely turns out very clearly. I tried it with white and black ink to see which would work better. Neither was very clear so I went over them both with gel pens. I’m working in my head on a Draw a Bird Day bird in the style of this stamp.

Here is what I painted at my first Process Painting class. I really enjoyed the layers of paint and interplay of colors.

Summer Waves Mandala

Tags

100 Mandalas, art, collage, Mandala, Mixed Media

Here is the Community Art Project mandala I have been working on in progress. I’m not sure it’s done yet. I will let you know if it changes.

I hope you have a beautiful day.

 

 

The Book That I Am

Tags

100 Mandalas, art, art journal, found word poetry, gratitude, gratitude journal, iridescent pearl, Mandala, Mixed Media, paper art, poetry, pumice, snowflakes, texture, yoga

Wow. This gratitude journal entry took me quite a while. There are layers of gratitude in this and a lot of textures. I was almost done with my ideas for the page when I came across this challenge:

The snowflake on the left hand page was not attached smoothly. I have been playing with a new way of making mandalas that combines my love of making snowflakes with mandalas. I used a makeup sponge to cover a paper snowflake surrounded by a circle cutout with blue acrylic paint onto watercolor paper.

After carefully lifting up the paint covered snowflake I tried to make a print of it in my gratitude journal. That is the mandala on the right hand page. The blue paint worked as an adhesive on the thin paper, so I decided to try to put the other snowflake in paint-side-up. I put E6000 spray adhesive on the page and what ever part of the sticky painted snowflake touched the adhesive there was no adjustment allowed. So, it became a spiky textured snowflake – quite in keeping with the challenge!

The lovely artwork on the right page was contributed by the daughter of a friend who purchased a set of my coloring pages. The figure’s hand is on the left-hand page – I loved the detail of nail polish and wanted this to stand out. There are layers of writing about things I am grateful for from the last 2 weeks, but the 2 biggest are YOGA and ART. I had the idea of doing the mosaic yoga letters from the first day I was able to get back to doing any yoga – I was that excited. Making these letters took a LONG time.

I wanted the mandalas and the 2 words to really be the focal points of the pages at this point so I was going to make the background a blue wash. It was about that point that I found the texture challenge. I was not having any luck getting the snowflake on the right to do anything I wanted so I covered the page with a combination of pumice gel medium, gesso, water, and blue acrylic paint. The overview photo doesn’t capture the texture of the combination very well. I used a tissue to clean up the blue paint and I decided to add one layer of the tissue to add texture to the right hand page. Here is a slightly better view of the left hand page and also shows the found word poem that became the title of the page spread. After I cut out all the letters for both yoga and art I cut out the words that intrigued me from the leftover bits of the page from a copy of The Pilgrim’s Progress that is over 100 years old!

So here is the poem that left me breathless in its appropriateness.

Willing

Hand

I find

the book

that I am.

   

I am amused that I’m having technical difficulties arranging the photos of my cut out letters for ART. The process also shows my frustration with how they were turning out. I was amazed that the mulberry paper and tissue paper turned out a lot more boring looking than I had hoped. I ended up also adding some silver Liquitex paint marker to them and more gel pen marks after all of these steps. Adding blue acrylic paint to the page helped them pop out more.

I am happy with how the layout turned out as a whole and it works with last week’s Journal 52 prompt of Child’s Play. Between the guest artist and the snowflake base I felt like this and my willingness to play with my materials are thoroughly captured in this page layout. I’m actually happy with the mandala that started out backwards, too. I surrounded it with some Golden Iridescent Pearl mixed with the same blue acrylic paint and I love how that turned out. So here is my 100 Mandalas mandala 59 of 100.

Thanks for taking the time to make it through that whole post! Have a beautiful day!

Vivid Idyll Refurb Collage

Tags

100 Mandalas, acrylic paint, altered art, altered art book, Altered book, Buddhist art, collage, Mandala, Mixed Media, Refurbished Art, Sharpies, Tibetan Art, Tree of Life, Upcycle, Watercolor pencils, Zendala

Here is the completed collage! I have been enjoying other people’s process photos and videos, so I’m including some of them for this piece. I really had fun with this.

Oh, the reconstituted collage poem was inspired by my blogging friend Claudia McGill. It reads

This observation is grounded

and

at first did not move her thus

I had a strange feeling

and kept walking.

and drifting among other souls

floating up

That complemented my mandala montage nicely, I thought. The funny thing is that the text is from a book I didn’t like and one I haven’t read. The larger text is from a more than 100-year-old copy of the Pilgrim’s Progress that my mother-in-law gave me for Christmas. She was reluctant to give me a “ratty old book” for a gift and I finally convinced her that I was very sincerely excited about the prospect of getting my hands on that book to use in my art. The other book was The Goldfinch which is printed on lovely paper and that is my favorite thing about the book. I learned the hard way not to do watercolors on the pages because there would be impolite language in the middle of a white flower (for example) and that was not the mood I was going for at all. That book needed some editing and I have enjoyed cutting the pages up for collage fodder.

So… here is the before photograph. I paid $20 to purchase this piece of “art” from a local gallery to enter their Refurbished Art Contest.

I like a challenge.

I really liked the girl walking into the painting on the antithesis of the yellow brick road. So I drew some fun mandalas (with my Pigma Micron pens on hot press watercolor paper) that I thought would make the landscape more interesting for her. I have been drawing them many mornings as part of my morning mandala practice. I decided early on to have a tree of life mandala as the centerpiece.

Then I painted and colored in the mandalas. I have been playing with Prismacolor watercolor pencils in addition to my usual Derwent Inktense pencils and I really like the pallet and effects possible with the different brands. I also used Sharpies for some of the coloring. I also painted some papers of different weights and cut out flowers and leaves for the Tree of Life mandala and decided to use some to decorate the borders.

I cut circles for the collage from the different assembled unpainted papers. I studied languages in college a really long time ago and have my notebooks from language classes (mostly Chinese and Spanish) that I really like to include as well as the aforementioned books. I usually throw in a relevant dictionary page. The page for this piece is “idyl, idyll” and I included that definition right by the girl I left in the picture, because it is her idyl, of course. I also have a page from one of my grandmother’s cookbooks, and a copy of a sheet of music from my son. So I cut circles and arranged them on the circle I traced around my dinner plate onto the print. I used matte medium to attach them.

The next step was inspired by the illustrations by Demi. You may recall my Inspiration Board post from earlier this year. That is where the idea for the background for my tree of life mandala was born! So I painted most of the collaged circles blue and went outside the lines so my clouds would be visible beyond the mandala. I also painted the lower portion with a very thin coat green so the papers showed through a little as the “ground” of the tree of life. When the paint was dry I went in and drew a Wheel of Joy and clouds and rocks inspired by Tibetan Buddhist art (a source of inspiration for Demi as well). The rocks are not visible in the photo, but that’s how gel pens are.

and then I put it all together with gel medium!

Here are all of the supplies I used.

This will be on display at Alter-Ego Studio in lovely Wisconsin. Come to see and/or purchase this piece! Have a beautiful day!

Inspired pages

Tags

Altered book, art journal, collage, gratitude, gratitude journal, Mixed Media, Visual Arts, Zenspirations

This collection of journal pages is inspired by some of the artists from 1,000 Artist Journal Pages http://www.dblogala.com/1000-artist-journal-pages/ and Joanne Fink of http://www.sakuraofamerica.com/zenspirations.

This is my first try at a dangle design and I am really happy with how it turned out. It isn’t very original at this point – but the process was fun and gave me lots of ideas.

These designs are inspired by other entries in the book and/or from information on Cloth Paper Scissors. I am loving all the inspirational materials from books and the internet. Art is so different from when I was learning to draw and paint in the early ’80s. It is so much fun! I hope it is as fun to look at as it was to create.

http://www.interweavestore.com/mixed-media?cid=2500&gclid=CIDJkvHdg7sCFQISMwodFH4Ayw