Art Journal

I've been trying different things in my journal. Underpainting in orange

Underpainting in red.

Also have done the on-line Strathmore workshops again this year. http://www.strathmoreartiststudio.com/ Workshop One with Traci Bautista took me out of my comfort zone -"Whether you are a beginner or an experienced artist, you will enjoy a creative escape as you combine different media, color, texture, collage, doodling, lettering and more to create your own mixed media paintings. Play with paper in ways you never imagined!" Her blog - http://kollaj.typepad.com/ While her style is not mine, I learnt heaps about playing and not being scared to try something I hadn't thought to use before E.G. white out ink. The first one was not my style at all but using new techniques and following someone switches off the internal critic. I think it is the colour combination and some mess. I used a wooden cut out from the craft store as a template and then embellished, with tentative circles of whiteout ink.

The next I used leaves as templates. Then embellishing. Some parts I like better than others. It really gives ides for journalling backgrounds tho. However, often I found i liked the art and didn't want to journal over it :)..

One thing about the workshop, even tho online, is the interaction with others, seeing their work gives inspiration and ideas, not only for ideas but colour combinations. Here I used buttons as templates for the flowers, spraying on acryllic and water colour. I bought cheap plastic spray bottles for $2.

This spread was more of the same but using cardboard letters as templates. I liked the colours. On the left i used the wooden templates and then pressed them on the right hand page. The white is corrugated cardboard shapes used as a stamp/. I liked that effect.

Here I added to the trials of colour combinations and made further use of the corrugated cardboard.

Another thing used as template was embroidery canvas. I like the neat lines of squares and I also had buttons . Here I put the templates on an uncoloured page but you can colour it first like i did when I used the leaves as templates.