My Lovely Gelli Plate

First off, let me just say that I am no way affiliated or compensated by any of the brands I mention here on my blog - I fall in love with supplies and want to share my enthusiasm for them. 

I love my Gelli Plate!!  I had never done any kind of print making before picking up this awesome supply and once I started it has become an addiction.  I don't think I've even begun to explore all the different things I can do with it but I am having fun doing what I'm doing. Plain and simple - layers.  I love the layers I can get with it!!!

Here's a little show and tell of one tiny little gelli plate session

I picked some colours to squirt on the plate - these are heavy body acrylics

Then I used my Catalyst wedge to spread the paint around.

I laid a stencil over top of the spread paint - in this pic below you can see I spread some of the left over paint onto a sheet of paper which will become a painted page to use in collage.

To pull prints from the stencil, I used a couple of already painted pages and a vintage book page

The paint was pretty much used up from the stencil so I pulled the stencil off and smashed it down on a journal page to create a negative image of the stencil.

The paint dries quite fast so I had to move quickly (it helps to have several journals and pages and painted backgrounds ready to pull prints with) and laid another painted page over top of the gelli plate and opened my journal to another page to try to use up all the paint before it dries. My favourite prints are the ones from these last few pulls where the paint has dried in some spots and it is really random how the print will turn out. 

I hope you enjoyed seeing one of my Gelli Plate sessions!! Would love to know if you've ever tried monoprinting before!!

Spray Ink Background Tutorial

I've fallen in love with spray inks!  I own Adirondack and also the Dylusions which are my fave for the bright colours.  I stumbled upon a way to use them as backgrounds for my mandalas - it is more fun for me to draw them on colourful backgrounds. 

Spray inks are water soluable and I find when I don't seal them with something the inks rub off on my hands while drawing - they also are a bit too vibrant for a background with marker so I like to knock them back a bit with a glaze of acrylic paint. 

You can try any kind of paper - these papers I am using in this book are everything from copy paper to wallpaper samples to handmade papers to textbook pages etc.  I find that a page prepared with Gesso is NOT a good foundation for the inks - they tend to slide right off and we are looking for saturation with the inks. 

This is my Big Bertha journal which I am using pretty exclusively at this point for mandalas.

Using the spray inks - spray through a stencil of your choice - once your spraying is complete - press a spare book page into the leftover ink on top of the stencil and you have a page all ready to collage or use some other way - and you haven't wasted the ink ;)

 You can blot any excess drops of ink if desired with a paper towel being careful not to scrub - the inks run and mix really easily. Once the ink is dry - seal it with a glaze of clean water and self leveling gel with a drop or two of white fluid acrylic paint per side of spread.

  I start with a brush dripping with fresh water and carefully (no scrubbing) running it over the page loading more water as needed - and then adding a bit of the white paint and making sure it is even and spreading it adding a brush load of self leveling gel to all the page so the water - paint and gel mix without disturbing the ink too much.  My goal here is to seal the page - and to knock back the intensity of the inks without blending the colours too much.  Of course experiment and find the affects you prefer.

Here is the left side of the spread completed - and I am not thrilled with how it turned out - I had 3 drops of white and I find it covered too much of the colour so I wiped off a drop of the white I had laid out on the right side. 

And the completed page which I will let dry - or speed up with my craft heat gun - and then spray with a varnish - matte finish.  The self leveling gel is sticky and tacky even when dry - the pages tend to stick together pulling off when the page is opened - the spray varnish leaves it with a smooth matte finish that is wonderful and not sticky.  I've worked over the varnish with paint, marker, gel transfers etc with good success. 

 Heh - so I wasn't happy with how that spread turned out - the colours were knocked back a bit too much for me.  I made another spread and took pics along the way.  Same technique - all except instead of using book pages to sop up the leftover ink I pressed another spread from this journal over it - I love the negative effect.

I ended up making several pages to blot up the excess ink and now have a nice little stash for collaging or cutting up into shapes to use in my art journaling.

You now have a colourful page to decorate as you wish - I've used this technique with 300lb Arches cold pressed watercolour paper and collage - it worked wonderfully! 

I hope you enjoyed this tutorial and have fun putting your own spin on it :)

Meet Big Bertha

Meet my newest girl - Big Bertha journal!!

She is 8"x8" - I made her myself thanks to the wonderful instruction of my darling daughter Karly :)  Big Bertha is my first handbound book and I loved the process.  She is filled with all kinds of found papers including discarded photocopies, pages from text books - music books - atlases and also some file folders and cut up paper shopping bags. I never quite know how those pages will accept the spray inks I've been using and that is half the fun of this book - happy surprises!!

This has become my Mandala journal and I am really enjoying the square format!  I have pics taken that need to be resized and I will post them soon along with a tutorial on how I create these backgrounds.

Here are a few pages from my Big Bertha journal -

 This next page is in progress - not completed yet

On a personal note - I am still not well these days - the process to find a medication that will help my depression and anxiety has not been easy.  I am still trying and have just started a new one - which once again is making me extremely dizzy.  I am finding that I have completely abandoned this blog and also reading all my fave blogs because the motion of my eyes going back and forth makes the dizzy worse.  So sorry to all my blog friends out there - I am hoping to get back to routine once I figure all this out.

On my good days I sit at my art desk and use my spray inks to create backgrounds for these mandalas - artistically all I can do on my dizzy days is sit quietly and draw my mandalas.  I am really thankful to have something to keep me busy :)

A Wonderful Arting Evening

Lee-Anne came over for a visit and some arting....what a wonderful evening! She is such a great friend and I appreciate her so :)

She's almost finished her first altered book and tonight she prepped her new one.  She also made the base for a beautiful spread and tag in one of the last pages of her very full first book.

You can see that chocolate is front and center - an important part of our arting ;)

Don't you love my messy table? You can see I have a meticulous filing system for my collage papers and my stencils.  yikes!  I need a new system for my overflowing paint bottle bucket.  I am still thinking on that one and haven't quite come up with the right idea yet.  I did buy some shelving for my table though and need to assemble it so my papers and stencils will be a bit more organized and accessible. 

Tonight I worked on a base for a spread in my Anxiety journal and I completed a page in my newest journal which I haven't titled yet....the journal not the page.  I figure that I am rapidly gaining a collection of journals and if they don't have titles then I won't know how to distinguish them from each other.  I took pics tonight of this newest journal and will show you in another entry - maybe by then I will have a title for the journal. 

happy arting!!

Loads of playing going on....

I haven't had a lot of dedicated time at my art desk lately but the time I have spent there has been very productive and a little bit scattered with nothing quite being "done" 

some fun new airbrush paints I tried in my new Strathmore journal - with some quick random doodling still in progress.  a page in my wine journal - painted with the labels glued in but no journaling yet.  I better get to it or I will forget my impressions of the wine!!

I really needed to journal this past week and got it all out on several journal spreads but both of these pages still need some embellishments I think...

 
some more journaling - upper left - this one in my anxiety journal.  I really like that page with the handcut vintage book page scrolls.  a spread in my newest altered book journal - with a gel transfer that I am really pleased with - I love how my  dress is a floral pattern similar to how I draw flowers....so neat!!

I started my cards to hand out for Mothers Day - with a collage on watercolour paper.  I am not sure where these are going just yet - most likely paint and mark making with a gel transfer over top - just not sure if I am going to use a photo for the transfer or maybe my doodles.....

If you are wondering about how many cards I am making here...no - I don't have a large amount of mothers ;)  I like to hand out either gifts or cards to the mothers I know which includes my sisters :)

Not photographed were the 3 journals that I Gessoed the covers in preparation for paint and collage etc.  I am super excited to work on those because it's always such fun to make a cover :) 

creating is good.  it keeps me happy :)

A Wonderful Afternoon

Carol came over this afternoon and we had a wonderful time arting!!  We enjoyed each others company, a great bottle of wine, some delicious Italian cheeses and salamis and we threw some paint around.  Even though Carol just started her altered book in February - she has already picked out her next book to alter because she only has a few spreads left!! 

Yup, she's hooked ;)

We also started planning our next trip to Italy - it is almost as fun to plan as it is to go.

I started a new journal today - totally spontaneous. I have always wanted to keep track of the wines we try and how we liked them and where we bought them.  My organizational skills are sadly lacking - I actually have a bought wine journal somewhere but I never used it.  heh.  Go figure.  Sometimes I buy wine because I like the label - yeah yeah - I know a pretty label is not exactly a good sign of a good wine.  I always intended to peel a pretty label off and save it.  heh.  never happened.  Until today....I had a book all glued and Gessoed - just waiting to be prettied up.  I did a bit of googling and figured out how to get the label off (this one wasn't purchased for the pretty label - it was purchased for it's age) and made a background for it.  A little journaling about the wine and I was smiling ear to ear that I finally had a system that feels like ME - an art wine journal!!

Now I am excited to paint the cover of this journal - it needs to be a fun cover :)

I hope you had a great weekend!!

Family Inheritance

This post has been sitting in Draft for many many days now. 

I guess it's sometimes tough to lay out my emotions.  Either that or I am lazy ;)

Seriously though, stigmas concerning mental illness make me angry - I am trying to change that.

This is in my Anxiety Journal - an appropriate place for it. 

My usual method of working in my journals is creating several backgrounds in one sitting having fun with paint, collage, gel transfers etc.  Then when I feel the urge to journal I flip through my book to see which page calls to me and fits my mood.  I have never created a page from start to finish in one sitting - until this page.

On this page was a failed - in my mind - attempt at using an image transfer - it was an inkjet copy used with self leveling gel - it didn't work.  The image smudged, the image wore off, it didn't work to my satisfaction at all.  You couldn't even recognise faces - my Geda holding me with my Baba and my older sister Carol.  I love this pic - there is a cow in the background!!  Anyway, one day I was playing around with some crackle paint and spread some over the pic to see if it would improve it.  Much to my delight it did!  I got out my Distress ink - vintage photo - and spread it around the edges. 

All of a sudden something clicked.  This page with my grandparents illustrated deep thoughts that had been on my mind for quite sometime.  The genetic aspect of anxiety and mental illness.  I have suffered from anxiety all my life and depression on and off for over 20 years.  Mental illness - both diagnosed and undiagnosed is prevalent on both sides of my family.  It is daunting to think what I have passed on to my daughters. I am not blaming or taking blame - just acknowledging the very real family history.

I got out my swirly stencil and my trusty Tri-Art Transparent Brown liquid acrylic.....

I had a greenish background in my head - I used Green Gold and Titanium White - not completely covering the page - just here and there....

Whoa!!  too limey yellow - toned it down with some light blue.....first sponging it on and then blending and rubbing some off with a baby wipe....

not quite the colour I was going for....I wanted to push it back a bit....I swear I owned Paynes grey - I must have taken it to leave in Phoenix at Carol's house.  So I improvised - picking out a more neutral blue and a grey - again sponging on and then wiping off with a baby wipe...

ahh yes....Titan Buff!!  the awesome colour that just kind of pulls everything together for me.  A fairly solid layer sponged on and then immediately water drops from my fingers sprayed all over.

After waiting a minute or two to let dry a bit - dabbed off with a tissue and then when almost dry I rubbed with same tissue to buff and weather it a bit.

The page titled itself - Family Inheritance.  I used rubber stamps with a sepia liquid acrylic.

Thank you for indulging me.  I believe by initiating discussion we can break down those old ideas about mental illness and maybe we can start to heal. 

My sister Carol is coming over today to work in our journals - it is going to be a great day!!