Meandering 6.30.2017

"Meandering: adjective; the act of following a winding or indirect course. 

Ramble, roam, zigzag, circuitous. A blog post about a variety of things; 

a little bit of this and a little bit of that."

It's been a while. I have these aspirations about being a regular blogger, putting up posts at least twice a week. The reality is I barely make it happen twice a month! But, I really enjoy blogging so for now I'll post when I can and keep striving for my personal goal of posting more often.

I am on day 78 of the 100 Day Project. My creative practice of choice for this project was to make collages from scraps on Rolodex cards. I combined this project with the Index-Card-A-Day (ICAD) project which began on June 1st, since Rolodex cards are included as index cards. The difference between the two projects is the 100 Day Project is totally self-led, while the ICAD project provides daily prompts. Some days I use the prompt and some days I don't. You can see all of my Rolodex art cards on Instagram (link in the sidebar on the right).

My Rolodex is filling up nicely. :)

Ever since I began this venture into making art with paper I have been drawn to collage. Lately I have been drawn to botanical collage pieces. I have come across a few collage artists whose botanical themed pieces just blow me away. One in particular, Julie Hamilton, paints her own papers to use in her collage art. I'm a sucker for painted paper!

From www.juliehamiltoncreative.com

A few other collage artists I admire for their botanical collage work are: Tiffany Calder Kingston and Jacgui Grace. Click their names and you will visit their websites.

So a few weeks ago, inspired by these artists, I painted some papers. I love to use the bookend papers from the books I take a part. This paper in older books has a great weight to it and I love how the color ages over time. With the painted papers I tried my hand at some botanical collage.

I even found myself wanting to bring home ferns and leaves from my walks in order to trace them for collage! But I didn't go that far. I used some of my stencils and used drawings from plant books to make templates. Then I used some of the painted papers to make a color wheel for my first page for the Get Messy Season of Color.

It's fun to try new techniques with art and I love combining them with my love of nature!

Circles and Walls

In my last post I mentioned that I was taking a class by Tammy Garcia at Daisy Yellow Art that was introducing me to new products and techniques. I have loved painting with my fingers ever since I started painting circles (see post here and tutorial here). So when Tammy introduced her technique called The Wall, and she did it with her fingers, I was hooked! I thought I would share a few insights and tips on the pages I made from this technique. I didn't plan on doing this post so I didn't take pictures along the way. I also will not share many details of the actual Wall technique in order to not infringe on Tammy's class material.

This was my first attempt at The Wall technique:

I loved the grungy look that resulted from the technique, but I don't think I used enough paint on this one. In figuring out the differences between the heavy body acrylic paint I was introduced to in this class, and the craft acrylic paints I usually use, the opacity of the heavy body acrylic requires using it a bit more and in layers to achieve the look I want. I tend to like the text of my background paper to peak through the paint. I usually get this effect by painting the paper with gesso before I paint it with color. However, it was recommended in the class that for these techniques that we NOT use gesso. At some point, though, I will experiment with gesso and the heavy body acrylic paints.

The next session added circles on top of The Wall technique. Now, if you have followed me for a while then you know how much I like circles. They pop up often on  my art journal pages, often without any forethought or planning. So, I was all about this project!

As I played I decided to put my own twist on the project - also no big surprise for me! But I think that is the beauty of taking classes or using tutorials - we learn new techniques and then add our own unique styles to them, rather then making cookie cutter copies of the artist's original. In the class we are using an altered book art journal for our class projects. I decided to do this piece on a loose piece of paper. One of my favorite types of paper to use to make background pages for my art journals is index pages from older atlases.

There a few reasons why I like this particular paper:

• It's large - anywhere from 9x12" up to 12x16".
• It's heavyweight, especially those from the older books. The weight of the paper holds multiple layers of paint well. And I enjoy building on layers of paint to achieve the types of backgrounds I enjoy.
• The text is tiny, like in a dictionary, but dictionary paper is usually fairly thin. Tiny text makes for a wonderful subtle background. 
• The older books generally used a cream paper, which ages to a nice tan-ish patina, while newer atlases use a brighter white paper. I'm sure it doesn't really matter too much what color the background paper is since I cover most of it with paint, but in my mind I think that the whiter paper affects the paint color. I'll have to test that theory at some point. Besides, I just like the patina of aged things!

I played for a long time, layering the paint, until I achieved the look I wanted. Then I tore the finished Wall page into strips and glued them slightly out-of-line onto a page in my class art journal. Although it's subtle, I like the effect of the torn, out-of-line strips on the background. I then added my circles using my favorite types of vintage ephemera, and used both a black Stabilo-All pencil and a black Neo-Colors II watercolor crayon to get the shading around the circles. The finishing touch was spattering paint in black and white.

I was quite happy with the results, and for a change, I didn't add any words to this page. I think words would actually take away from it rather than enhance it.

I had enough of the Wall paper leftover to make a background page in my Traveler's Notebook.

As always, you can find packs of ephemera papers in my Etsy shop. I may even create packs of vintage index pages since I have SO many atlases! Give me your thoughts on that in the comments below.

Thank you to my friend, Diane Kundrat, for encouraging me to write about some of my techniques and tips on my blog. Diane lives in Arizona and we have been online friends for 5-6 years as a result of my blog. A few weeks ago we finally got to meet in person in Cleveland where we spent an afternoon art supply shopping together!