Chartres Labyrinth on Watercolor Grid & Cat

Tags

100 Mandalas, art, cat, collage, gouache, grid, labyrinth, watercolor

The storage box I’m decorating is coming along nicely. I’m working out ideas for designs for our shower curtain. I was thinking a labyrinth with some color but I don’t think so. This is my interpretation of my favorite labyrinth, from Chartres Cathedral in France. I was struggling with how to add some color to it without distracting too much. I don’t think the grid works for that, but it was an interesting first shot at a grid with gouache. I was inspired to do this by Laura at Create Art Every Day. Some things I learned with this first grid.

1. Painting with gouache on top of collaged papers with gesso and matte medium create some unexpected and interesting effects.
2. It is important when painting a grid to let adjacent squares dry completely before painting the next square.
3. I’m not very good at waiting for paint to dry.
4. I enjoy playing with watercolors this way and have some ideas for other grid fun.

The cats are still settling in after the move and don’t want me to be in my studio. The door to my studio doesn’t latch very well so they can get in here at will. I am smarter than my cats and I put a box of art supplies in front of the door and attached a string to it to pull it against the door as I leave. However, the pathetic crying of cats while I’m in my studio has me working in my air-conditioned bedroom instead. Here is one of my assistants at work.

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.

 

RIP David Bowie & Misc. Gratitude

Tags

Altered book, art, art journal, collage, gratitude, watercolor, zentangle

These journal pages include a lot of sketches and practice work. Also, I realized I had not marked the new year and I thought I should get that in here. I usually start a new journal with a new year, but I’m really loving this book that I am altering and I plan to stick with it until I’m out of pages. The photographs of Andreas Feininger are so gorgeous. It is lovely to let bits and pieces show through as I did on these pages or to allow the picture to help enhance my journaling as on this page layout from September.

This week marked the passing of David Bowie and Alan Rickman (Snape from the Harry Potter movies). Both were fabulous artists and I am sorry for their passing. What a wonderful blessing though to have lived at the same time as they did! I was fortunate enough to join my sister, Janine, to see David Bowie on the Glass Spider tour. We were somewhat disappointed because we were great fans of his earlier work, but I’m so glad we got to share the experience. Of course our favorite song was “Janine.” We spent many happy hours singing and dancing to Ziggy Stardust and his other albums.

In my previous post you saw the product of my thank you cards and this shows some of the progress. I really enjoyed painting the old book pages with watercolors. I used my Dr. Ph Martin’s watercolors first on wet pages.  I was inspired by some of the art I saw at the Eco Squared Exhibit opening.

They dried a lot lighter than I wanted so I went in with my Crayola watercolors to make a wall of color on each page.

I am really happy with the way the colors blended and pooled. These old pages really soak up a lot of water and are kind of fragile. Fortunately I have a lot of pages to keep experimenting on. I really loved how the thank you cards turned out when I cut out the letters.  I used a bunch of the scraps on this gratitude journal page layout. I also included a technique that I saw at the Eco Squared show. One of the artists had cut out areas of paper to let text or musical notations to show through. I, of course, had to add a layer (or 2) of color in my interpretation.

I was so happy when I saw that I could have the words “drawing” and “circle” show though the cut parts. I was going to do some illustration on top, but I really like how it turned out with a simpler design.

My latest mandala is the antithesis of simple design. My vision has been good enough that I was able to make the kind of mandala I really love to draw – super fancy.

Have a beautiful day!

 

Wordless Wednesday: Autumn Mandala

Tags

100 Mandalas, acorn, autumn, Inktense, leaves, Mandala, watercolor

Playing With Art Supplies

Tags

altered art, art journal, coloring, gel pens, gratitude, gratitude journal, watercolor

Can you see my “pallet” for my compass rose mandala? I play with combinations of marker colors and which gel pens go well over the top. I really didn’t do much to these book pages except some journaling and attaching the various papers. The ticket is from my visit to the Milwaukee Art Museum. The watercolor landscape is from playing with the Dr. Ph. Martin’s Watercolors that my husband got me for my birthday. I have lots of scraps of watercolor paper from cutting it to make my coloring page sets (I plan to have these for sale in my Etsy store by the end of October.) and I use them to create “journaling boxes” by playing with different watercolor combinations and effects. I have been looking for a watercolor class, but I have not found one in my area. If you know of an online one you recommend I would love for you to share that information!

Here is the cover page for the Coloring Page Sets. There are 5 designs in this Mandalas set and you get 3 copies of each design. Two of the copies are on plain paper and one is on 140 lb cold press watercolor paper. I started making these because I love to color, but I really love to use watercolor pencils and the paper for most coloring books was not making me happy. I kind of think of my mission statement as contributing toward peace and beauty in the world and I think these are moving in the right direction. I hope you have a beautiful day.

To Attain Something Beautiful

Tags

100 Mandalas, beauty, Color, coloring, flowers, Helen Keller, Inktense, painting, watercolor

Another Helen Keller quote today:

Remember no effort that we make to attain something beautiful is ever lost. Helen Keller.

So I tried something quite different for me. Bigger shapes and just playing with color. I’m still figuring out techniques to best use the Inktense watercolor pencils and I learned a few more things today. I found it quite enjoyable, but I did overdo it and ended up with a little bit of eye strain. So I learned something else important for tomorrow. And I think I may hang this up in our newly remodeled bathroom! Have a beautiful day.

Wordless Wednesday: Painted Paisley Pig

Tags

folk art, illustration, Inktense, paisley, pig, red, Sharpies, watercolor, zentangle, ZIA

Elements of Yoga Retreat

Tags

100 Mandalas, acrylic paint, art journal, Buddhist art, Diva Challenge, joy, lettering, meditation, Tibetan Art, watercolor, yoga, zentangle

Joy is the most important element of yoga to me. My yoga teacher is a proponent of feeling joy in the poses or modifying them to meet your needs. This is just the right fit for me. We did a lot of yoga in 2 days and I really loved it. I had to sit out part of a standing mediation that triggered my migraine, but that was after a lot of really excellent practice. We did lots of Sun Salutations as the sun sparkled on Green Bay. We did circle balance poses that are so beautiful and exhilarating. As we rested on our right side at one point the beauty of another yogini’s feet with the sunshine and shadows was so beautiful I wished I could stop to draw them or take a photograph. Oh, and we ate! Yummy and healthy foods. We started our days with silence and ended with talking and laughter. It was so good to see old friends and make new ones.

The Journal 52 prompt for this week is Elements. That made me think of the Tibetan Buddhist styles of representing the elements in art. As I was drawing them, I realized that each one corresponded with an element of yoga.

Air – clouds –  breathing

Water – the waves of Lake Michigan and Green Bay – and flow

Earth – rocks – grounding, finding my foundation

Fire – flames – generating some heat!

The mandala on this page is inspired by the shirt of one of my new friends at the retreat.

I was also inspired by the Diva’s challenge to use the tangle pattern Tipple as the background for my “joy” page. It provides just the effervescence I was looking for! To see other interpretations of her challenge check out her Diva Challenge.

Have a beautiful day!

Two Years of Gratitude

Tags

art journal, gratitude, gratitude journal, inspiration, Lisa Kokin, Mandala, watercolor

I am getting ready to go to the Friendship Lodge for my annual yoga retreat and that reminded me that the 2 year anniversary of my blog is coming up! Interestingly, I just switched from the altered book journals that I have been making for more than 2 years to a watercolor journal.

Here are the beginnings of my watercolor gratitude journal:

I am so happy how the mandala and doodle page came out. It is inspired by 2 different articles in the newest issue of Cloth Paper Scissors. And the page below didn’t turn out quite how I wanted, but that is why I’m doing this! learning and growing! Right? And the day was really wonderful. I have gotten away from my gratitude journaling practice and I missed it. This past weekend we had a graduation party for my younger son and it was so wonderful. And it was wonderful on Monday to eat leftovers and enjoy all the flowers from the party! We had hummingbirds come to our patio and I tried to capture that. My son also rescued the painted turtle that I posted photos of this week, as well. My new copy of Cloth, Paper, Scissors came in the mail and I discovered a new artist who inspired the above mandala. Her name is Lisa Kokin and I hope to get to one of her workshops someday! She is an altered book and mixed media artist.

I am off to Friendship Lodge again. Thank you for all your time, attention, and comments. This blog has grown into something I really love and I hope you find some joy and beauty here, too. Also, I hope you have a beautiful weekend!