Tag Archives: craft

Hump Day Prompt #6: Artist Quality Acrylic Paints

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The prompt is open ended and deals only with the
material, subject and content are up to you, but the
material is dictated.

Artist Quality acrylic paints. There are lots of brands of
“artist quality” paints. I’m a fan of Grumbacher and liquitex. Grumbacher dries
flatter where liquitex dries shiny and plasticy. Acrylics don’t crack and
remain flexible forever. That flexibility over time is also a difficulty that
you’ll need to deal with as your pages will stick together if not treated
properly. At most craft stores you can find an inexpensive set of acrylic
paints with a variety of colors, these are great to get you started.

Prompt #6 Use “artist quality” acrylics to makes a
page.

Leave a comment with a link to your blog with pictures of what you’ve done!

(Note: after you finish a page with artist quality acrylic, particularly more expensive brands you’ll notice a slight taskiness left tot he page, weeks and even months later. This is a serious issue to addressw ith a block of wax or candle. I favor rubbing down a page with a 50/50 mix of paraffin and bee’s wax  and then burnishing it down with a soft piece of cloth. This will seal the page and keep it from sticking. You could also just slip a sheet of waxed paper between pages. Do this last because you won’t be able to stick more paint on top of the wax- most won’t stick.)

Hump Day Prompt #5 “Craft” Acrylic

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The prompt is open ended and deals only with the
material, subject and content are up to you, but the
material is dictated.

Next on the hit parade is acrylic. I love me some acrylic
paint. When you start art journaling your going to go to the craft store and
look at the seas of paint- 2 parted but like seas of artist grade VS craft
grade- what to do!!!!! Both are great for different reasons. Craft grade
acrylic has come a long way in the last 20 years. The bigger brands have added
some lightfastness and quality to their paints. IN terms of craft paint price
is directly linked to their quality. Most tubes are around $1. I like Delta
brand. Applebarrel comes in a lot of colors. Find a sale and spend $6. Pick up a
tube of red, yellow, blue, green, and orange. Buy darker colors- you can add
white later. These liquid paints are great for backgrounds and flat painting,
ie if you don’t want texture these are wonderful. They dry quickly and dry
matte or flat. They layer well and some people do fantastic stuff with them.
The great thing about them is that unlike artist quality paints they dry
completely and don’t stick to one another, so you can work on facing pages and
not worry about the pages sticking together.

Prompt #5- use craft grade paints to make a page.
 
Leave a comment with a link to your blog with pictures of what you’ve done!

(Note: In relation to last weeks HD Prompt craft grade acrylics are GREAT for toning pages. Try it you’ll like it.)

Hump Day Prompt #4 Toned Pages

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The prompt is open ended and deals only with the
material, subject and content are up to you, but the
material is dictated.

White pages can be intimidating and boring. I like to randomly turn through my journal and "tone" a page with either watercolor or gouache. I try to stick with a nice even layer of color that doesn’t quite come to all the edges and is a little imperfect. If you like working in colored pencils this adds a fantastic layer of tooth to the page, allowing it to hold a lot of color. It’s also fantastic for pastels.

Prompt #4- Go through your journal with some
basic colors of gouache or watercolors, tone pages. Lay down a thin even coat of one color to
a page. Try yellow ochre (or yellow), red, blue and green. Let the pages dry over
night and then draw on them with a thin sharpie. Nice isn’t it. Gouache has
great tooth for drawing. Try drawing on it with pencil, colored pencil, and
pen. Now go back and add more colors. Mhhh nice isn’t it? You like that don’t
you?

Leave a comment with a link to your blog with pictures of what you’ve done!

(Note: this can also be done with acrylic but that limits what you can put on the page afterward to more acrylic, which is why my suggestion is to stick to watercolor or gouache for this- they way you can add to it with just about anything and even layer on acrylic later if you want.)

New Art: “Life Illustrations”

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In my journal I’ve been doing what I call "Life Illustrations" in that I try to take one aspect of something on my mind and illustrate it in one image, distill it down so that the image is evocative for me later. I’ve done quite a few and many are too personal for me to share but I’ve taken a few from my journal and used those as sketches for a few small paintings and here are 2 of them:

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I’ve been quite disgusted with this whole steroids in sports controversy. What disgusts me more is that my tax dollars are going towards investigating it. I’d rather have my money spent on kids in schools than knowing is Clemens infact took steroids. Perhaps Clemens should pay for the investigation with a couple mill of the money he’s made pitching. I made a sketch in my sketchbook of this first. I’ll load up some pics of that later.

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I was discussing the idea of a carbon footprint with someone the other day and this image came to mind. You might remember this image from my sketchbook.

I’m putting both of these up on etsy, you can find them here.

Hump Day Prompt #2- Colored Pencils

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Hdprompt_2

The prompt is open ended and deals only with the
material, subject and content are up to you, but the
material is dictated.

Let’s face it lack of color can be, well, boring. There are
lots of things to add color. I use 2 or 3 media off and on depending on mood.
Colored pencils are about as basic as they come and come in lots of colors. Get
a nicer brand; Palomino, Prismacolor or 6mm Prang (trust me on this one- they
are *&*%^ nice!). Don’t buy Crayola colored pencils. They have a hard wax
base that doesn’t lend them to anything but not breaking. A nice colored pencil
will let you layer colors and create rich depth of color or lay on beautiful
thick layers of rich color, or just write in color.

Prompt #2- Use colored pencils to create a journal page. You
can write, draw or glue the colored pencils to the page but you have to create
some sort of image with them.

Leave a comment with a link to your blog with pictures of what you’ve done!

New Hedgehog Moleskin

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Immediately after finishing my last hedgehog/ moleskin I started a new one. This one has distressed brown and black sheep hide covers, is 3.5×5.5 in size and was entirely hand made by me. It got kraft paper pages which is something new for me to work on. I used rough wrapping paper kraft paper for the pages too so it has a great texture for drawing and such.

So far it has been taking every sort of abuse I can hand to it, thus far in this book, I’ve gesso’d pages in clear and white, tinted pages with acrylic, glued in magazine pages with matte medium, sanded gesso off the pages, added layers of magazine, acrylic and ink. I’ve scraped with a pallet knife and credit cards. I’ve wiped on and off with a rag. All in all this paper is tough as nails. Unlike the 140lb printmaking paper it does cockle a bit but after drying it smooths out quite a bit. I’m very pleased with the amount of abuse that this book has taken, and to think that this books was one I deemed unsalable because I screwed up and trimmed the cover short. (Note how far the fore edge pokes out from the cover. Looks good with this but not so good when first made.)

After you get done looking at these pictures head on over to my Flickr account and see more pictures. I didn’t load them all here because it takes longer but at flicker you can see all the spreads thus far that are in the book.

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