I have a friend, whom I've shamefully not seen in months, who paints a lot of pictures of himself as a rabbit ad in general a lot of pictures of rabbits in a variety of costumes. He also paints dogs… Anyway. I thought this was really cool. I love the texture of the canvas/paper peeking through.
This moleskine has a really interesting concept- one idea throughout the entire journal. This might be a good idea for a jotter notebook. 48 pages all working out one concept, one idea over and over one each page.
For those of you who remember, back in the day I used to do a few zines*, and I've been thinking of doing another. Some of who who do remember are probably breathing a sigh of relief that I've not finished another zine, those of you who were of my few fan who bought or traded for my zine back-in-the-day are probably frowning right now.
I have ideas, oh man, do I have ideas. But I am having issues committing them to paper. OR I commit them to paper and I immediately decide they are not good enough for print or to go to the effort of scanning and printing, or I tell myself that scanning and resizing them will make them illegible and who wants to read a zine that is written in illegible chicken scratch.** Especially if it's resized and warped chicken scratch. Furthermore the idea of taking the pages that I've been thinking of as for the zine and transcribing them makes my head twitch, really it does.
So I keep thinking in the back of my mind: ZINE ZINE ZINE, I get to a point where its time to work on it and I have all kinds of mental excuses that stop me from actually working on the zine and allow me the excuse of "It won't work." So rather than working on it, I spend my time tweeting, browsing the 'nets and not working on it.
SO As my first step BACK into zine world I'm hoping to scan pages from my art journals. Some will be printed in black and white and others in color, we'll see how that works. I have a feeling it's going to be a big pain in the arse. Which of course will be another GIANT excuse not to work on my zine. It's been a long time, i think the longer it's been the harder it is to start working on it again.
*To Avoid Suffocation from 1998 to 2000 6 issues, The Pocket Rocket from '99 to '02 and it had about 15 issues. MY print run at the largest for TAS was 100 zines. I also did a slew of one off "Art Zines" I have another 15 or so of those to my credit. These were done under the names LessH, LessGull (long stupid story) and simply Less as well as some email addresses.
**A teacher once referred to my handwriting as cockroach droppings on paper. I know this is probably a quote from a book but it really does credit to how BAD my handwriting really it, unless I really try or I'm writing in a particular style or have JUST done some calligraphy my handwriting is the epitome of lazy.
This is a very cool image of a heart. I'm partial to heart diagrams, for a variety of reasons, but this is a particularly cool one.
I really like how Millande describes how to do this technique and it would work very very well for a darker sort of art journal.
Chris Dent does some great stuff here in this moleskine of city scapes and other drawings. I love simplicity of the black and white and the activity of his line. Very nice and well done. Great inspiration to draw everyday!
I’ve been steadily working in my journal. THis is from a week or so ago. It’s a gesso covered page, written on in sharpie, covered in gesso, areas masked out, painted on in paint, masked, then stenciled with paint and spray inks. I applied a layer of watercolor crayons and sealer. I loaded a bunch of pages from my journal into flickr. You can see them here.
Again I really like the darker art focus in this journal. Good stuff, intriguing.
I loaded some new items up to my artfire shop. 2 more art covered journals filled with 100% cotton sketchbook paper and original art on the covers.
I listed a dozen new jotter sets with mixed paper inside. The paper ranges from lined paper, graph paper, pink, blue, green, to all sorts of natural shades I usually use. I had a box, a large one, from 10 years of binding of various papers I just didn't have enough of to make a full book. I literally shuffled the pages together to mix them up, and used 15 sheets for each jotter, for a total of 60 pages. Each of these jotters is unique and the mix of papers is individual.
I also listed one NOS or new old stock hedgehog/ moleskine journal. It's covered in this old school leather that reminds me of those old time leather basketballs. I can't find this leather anymore and I used this last piece to make this book, back in 2007. The journal has sat in a wrapper, in a drawer since then. I considered using it, becuase I like the leather that much, but decided against it and listed it again. I've got it up for less than normal.
I also listed 2 more brand new hedgehogs, one with a chocolate brown leather cover filled with cream paper and another with a bomber jacket brown leather filled with pale green paper.
I also re-listed the palomino pencils. These are the last packages I have of the HB and 2b, my favorite sketching softness. After I finish with those I'll list some of the other pencils I have left over from my old website. (Does anyone remember when this used to be a website with stuff for sale? Me either.)
You can follow the links in the text to any of the mentioned items, as always feel free to ask me any questions or for more picture if you're interested.
This is my favorite page out of my current art journal. I made it by covering the page in gesso, then writing on it in sharpie, going over that with a very thin coat of gesso. Then I masked out my tree shapes with painters tape, that I cut with an exacto,
I painted over the shapes with yellow acrylic, then put layers of watercolor crayon over the top of that. I used orange red and yellow. I then cut a stencil and a few masks from some old poster I had around. I covered the back in spray glue. I put down the masks where I wanted the yellow colro to stay. I then used the stencil to add layers of green, blue, red, orange, and dark yellow spray inks. My intent was to give the feel of leaves falling.
the layers of color and ink also help to obscure the actual writing with the sharpie, which lifts through the layers of gesso and acrylic to add some visual texture to the painting itself. I like this page a lot because of thes layers of color and meaning.
The journal entry was about how much I love fall but miss being in school.