Once again I was able to convince myself to make some time for playing in my art journal and I’m really glad I did. Doing it during quiet time helps me feel less lonely since I can hear the kids in their rooms playing and today my love was in the room with me taking a nap so it was an especially nice afternoon.
I finished my Trev page. I thought it might be the end of my moleskine as the page started pulling out of the book, but I stitched it back in with some embroidery floss. From this point forward I’ve started reinforcing the center of each set of pages with a strip of duct tape. Not very pretty, but I cover it anyway with paper and gesso before I even start creating anything so I don’t think it’ll be very obvious. It should help a lot since it’ll prevent most of the wet media from seeping through the middle. If not, I’m fully prepared to stitch more pages in as needed.
The page on the right was based on a sketch from Stuck Sketches. It’s something else I’ve decided to try for at least the time being. When I did a ton of digital scrapbooking I used sketches all the time. I fell away from it as I started taking a less linear approach to creation, but I don’t see why I can’t work a sketch in here and there without losing spontaneity. I think I stayed pretty faithful to the original sketch, but I still explored areas I wanted to experiment (gesso over a Silhouette cut transparency stencil in the upper corner) and did things that made it feel personal to me like honor Trev’s request that I use shapes punched from a soda can. All in all, it was a fun spread to work on.
I was also able to finish up a page that I started months ago. I did the background during the summer, but didn’t really know what I wanted to do with it so it sat there, patiently waiting. So today I went in and filled in the journaling.
This layout was all about playing and very little concern went into design. I dressed a magazine cut out in clothes I created by cutting book pages and patterns from other magazines. She rests on a background I created by scraping molding paste through sequin waste. The raised dots are kinda fun to run my fingers over. I am really attracted to journal pages that promise opportunities to touch.
Due to a question posted on Julie’s Flickr group I was inspired to take some photos of my work area. In the past I’ve had an entire room for my stuff, but in this house I’ve been reduced to a corner of my bedroom so I’ve tried to make the most of it. I also use my walk in closet for storing things and I will most likely take a photo in there soon, but first it needs some serious reorganization before I’d willingly share that publicly. All my photos are clickable to my Flickr, but these next couple are annotated with descriptions of what everything is so if you’re curious, feel free to check them out.
And what photo tour of my “studio” would be complete without a photo of my lovely assistant, Azrael?
