Arting from Acrylics to Zentangle

Tags

100 Mandalas, acrylic paint, collage, Derwent Inktense, inspiration, Watercolor pencils, Zentangles, ZIA

Got a start on my Mother’s Day Cards.

Added some Derwent Inktense to the Zentangle® Inspired Art. Not sure if its done yet.

After this I was really itching to do some collage. I’m going to do another painting redo. I got too busy to show you how my last one turned out.

The original painting from a class I took was a sunset winter landscape in shades of blue and orange/yellow – not really my style, but nice enough. I did some collage on top and then added a tissue paper mandala and did some embellishing and here it is. It is getting toward what I want. I learned a little about doing detailed drawing on tissue paper and then putting it on a colorful background – it gets totally muddled. In any case I’m counting it as mandala #40.

So here is the first step of my next try. I have a landscape that I started, but it didn’t go quite right.

So now I’m off to collage over this. I hope you have a beautiful day!

Community Art Project Mandala in Progress

Tags

100 Mandalas, art, art journal, Blue, collage, gratitude, Green, Inktense, watercolor, Watercolor pencils

I’m working on a 6×6 canvas for a fundraiser for my Art Association back in Beaver Dam. Here are my gratitude journal pages that have been helpful in the process of trying some things out. I will show you the finished project by the end of the week.

It has been interesting to only use the art journaling supplies that I brought with me to the hotel to create this canvas. I did a lot of experimenting with textures because I only had markers and watercolors to add color and I also wanted texture and a mandala. So…

It began simply enough with some stamped and stenciled words and smiley faces scattered around the canvas. I covered them with some watercolor washes to get a layer of color on the canvas. Blue and green just make me think of summer so that was where I started. I drew a purple flower with my Derwent Inktense pencil into the wet watercolor wash to see how it turned out. It seemed like too stark a contrast and I wanted to stencil some gesso over the top to add some texture to the piece.

I cut a heart shape out of some netting that a bunch of lemons came in. I tried to use this as a stencil with the gesso but that was quite a fail. So I attached the goopy heart into my journal. I have had a lot of success with this technique with acrylic paint, and it was interesting to try. Without a brayer I couldn’t figure out how to use this to make a print. It left some strange gesso globs on the canvas that left me challenged. It is very difficult to draw a mandala on top of a highly textured collage, but I really like how it looks. So I had to get creative. I added a layer of facial tissue that had soaked up a bunch of my watercolor paint and used matte medium to attach it. In the past this has provided a nice surface to write and draw on. It was too fragile to draw the mandala on the dry tissue and was still a little too textured for the kind of detailed mandala I had in mind.

I then started drawing mandalas on a variety of papers to see how I liked them. Fortunately we needed to buy a gift for a young friend and I was so happy to buy some tissue paper. I had never drawn a mandala on this flimsy stuff but it went a lot better than I expected! I’m really excited about exploring this technique some more. You can see here I attached a piece of the mandala over all of my experiments in my journal. I really like the way the watercolor pencils add depth and highlights to the mandala. I hope you have a beautiful day!

 

Winter Flowers

Tags

art journal, feather, flowers, paper flowers, watercolor, Watercolor pencils

Just messing around last night and today. This will go into my gratitude journal.

 

Building with Paper

Tags

altered art book, Altered books, art journal, cherries, cherries with pits, collage, Elsie de Wolfe, gratitude, hostess gift, Liquitex paint pens, painting, painting workbook, paper art, quotes, simple syrup, Watercolor pencils

I am back in my altered book journal and decided to document the process of this week’s entry as I’m experimenting for a larger piece. I started out with the back of a piece of watercolor paper from last week on the left hand page. I found this quote on the blog Hey It’s Frances To and it really struck a chord with me. I really like what she has done with her lettering portfolio, too. So when I saw that the Journal 52 prompt was Positive Change we had another week with synchronicity! Hooray! My lettering is a little half hazard as I have not been practicing it very much lately, but I do like how the page came out overall. While my vision problems continue, I am finding different things I can do to express my creativity and make my life interesting and hopefully add to the beauty in the world. The flowers were cut out from a scrap of leftover map that I like to use as a metaphor for my intentions for where I am headed. I used marker in the middle and blue watercolor pencil around the outside of each flower.

The right hand page started with a few slaps of the paint that I’m using in our unplanned bathroom remodel. The shade of green is called Peter Pan and my son just finished working as the music director for our children’s theater production of Peter Pan Jr. It was just another funny coincidence that we chose that color – not intentional. The latex wall paint was not adhering well to the page so I used a credit card to spread a little gesso on the page. I added some blue acrylic paint for my sky. My cityscape was inspired by a project in the book The Painting Workbook by Alena Hennessy (now listed in my Reference and Recommendations page.)

I liked how the blue didn’t really cover the top of the page and I really covered the bottom of the page with the green. I used a tip from the Painting Workbook and drew into the wet paint with a watercolor pencil, but it didn’t work very well. I don’t know if that was because it was latex wall paint instead of acrylic paint. I will try again another day. I really did like how the scratched out flowers went through to the original colors on the page. I tried a few different brands of watercolor pencils and the Inktense ones left a little color, but none of the other ones did.

I decided that I wanted to make an Art Deco building in my cityscape so I cut different papers into shapes that were Art Deco inspired and I painted them in colors that made me think of Art Deco. One of the techniques that I used that I was pretty happy with was putting the long thin strips down the center of the band-aid looking pieces to make “windows” on them at regular intervals. I recently got a set of 3 Liquitex paint markers and I am really loving them. They were great for adding details to my “building.” I played around with the different paper shapes until I came up with a building that I found interesting. I did some journaling with a white pen on the blue sky and glued everything in place. I painted the flowers with the orange Inktense watercolor pencil after experimenting with a few other media and I drew some leaves and grass with green markers. I learned a lot in the process of making this page and I hope this has been instructional for you too!

On a totally unrelated note…

I made a cherry simple syrup without pitting the cherries. We got 7 pounds of cherries from our CSA and that is a LOT of cherry pits. For the last pound or so I was looking for something to do that would not require removing the pits and I had a hard time finding anything. All the simple syrup recipes I found required pit removal. I decided to try it with them in and it worked beautifully. So here is my version:

1 cup water

1 cup sugar

a bunch of cherries without stems but with pits

Simmer everything at a low heat for at least 10 minutes and then squish through a sieve. Keep the syrup in the fridge for as long as it lasts. It is fabulous in lemonade or iced tea. I don’t know what the shelf life is because mine doesn’t last more than 2 weeks. It also makes a lovely housewarming gift or summer party hostess gift.

I hope you have a delicious 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!