Saturday, January 3, 2015

January 1-3, 2015: Journal Pages

Hello, and welcome to my first post of the year!

As I mentioned previously, I'm hoping to post on here daily, or at least as close to daily as possible. With New Year's Day and my birthday (the 2nd), I haven't gotten around to posting until now. However, despite the busyness, I have managed to work on my art journal on every day. Thus, I do have some things to share.


I would like to start us off by addressing my journal itself. I'm a big fan of reusing/altering objects and books if at all possible, and that's just what I have been doing. The base for my first art journal of 2015 is a clothing catalogue I was sent in the mail, and I've simply been working on top of the pages.

A lot of people suggest gluing pages together, or using gesso on top of them before beginning. The purpose of this is to thicken the pages into something more substantial. I've found that, with my work, the layers of paint, stamping, collage, and whatever else I decide to do, the pages thicken themselves. Feel free to do what works best for you.


For the first day of the year, I did what only seemed natural and worked on the cover of my brand new journal. At first, I was extremely conflicted. I wasn't quite sure what I was going to be inspired by, which, at least for me, makes it almost impossible for me to accomplish anything.

However, about halfway through the day, my mind wandered back to the dictionary word of the day I had received earlier on. Incunabula- the earliest stages or traces of anything:


That word was beyond inspiring to me for several reasons, the most obvious of which being that it was the beginning of the year. In addition to that, it was also the beginning of a new journal. The combination of the two made it almost impossible to ignore, and this page spawned from that single word.

The circular section in the lower right is my favorite portion of the page. I achieved this result only after many layers of tape and collage for texture, multiple colors of paint, pastels, stenciling, stamping, and probably a few more things that I can't remember at the time. 


My page for the second of January, unlike the one from the first, was based on a prompt. It was a single word prompt, only the word 'bloom'. The instant I thought of the word, the image on the page came to my head. When I think of the word 'bloom', I imagine something that is bursting out from an internal point.

It took me a bit of working with different paints and doodles, even on the page itself, but I eventually managed to get the idea out of my head and onto paper. 


Finally, we get to today's page. For this page, I actually drew my inspiration from several different prompt sources. 'Pathways' and 'Your Hand'. In addition, I decided that I wanted to incorporate all of the above colors of paint, even though they didn't necessarily go together. My reasoning for that was solely that I had gone to Michael's and got all of them for 51 cents apiece. 


For the 'pathways' prompt, I did several different things. First and most noticeably, the text was inspired by this word. I don't know how I came up with the words, but they just came to me and I decided to type them up on my typewriter and put them on the page. Secondly, the boxes were somewhat inspired by the theme. 

There were also several ways I was inspired by the hand prompt. First, I was only planning on incorporating it by doing my painting with my fingers. The majority of the painting was done in that manner, but I also added on to that by tracing my fingers onto the top and bottom of the page, creating the scalloped edge. 

That about wraps up my art for the past three days! I've had a lot of fun working on these things, and am definitely looking forward to sharing more in the future!

2 comments:

  1. These pages are stunning. I was truly impressed by the way you incorporated your hands in the last one. And happy belated birthday, too.

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