ART JOURNAL EVERY DAY - A Face A Day - 9th June 2011

INTERACTIVE ART!

I have been dying to try out some ideas from this wonderful book

"Interactive art workshop : set your mixed media in motion" by Kim Rae Nugent"

The idea for this face is to take a child's game, remove the back and replace it with an image of you own and you have a totally different piece of work.









I "channelled" Aubrey Beardsley again as it gives quite a contrasty image which works best behind the plastic - subtlety vanishes!


I have some different toys to try later -  like a little round maze and a miniature pinball machine - so they will  appear during the month.


I think I should draw some men now!

ART JOURNAL EVERY DAY A month of faces - June 8th

This one was inspired by another image mined from my discovery journals (see yesterday's post).

I kept a birthday card with a picture from Yoshistoshi 's
series "the four season at their height".


I like this for the colour, pattern and contrasts - though the face I have done looks older than the original

ART JOURNAL EVERY DAY A month of faces - June 7th

I am continuing my month of faces for June's "Art Journal Every Day"

Again I am using a page of grids done for Strathmore Workshop 2 as they give me an ideal "canvas" for this project.

Some time ago I worked through Sarah Ban Breathnach's "Simple Abundance" - this is a wonderful book which encourages you to review your life and value the everyday.

As a result I keep a daily gratitude journal - listing 5 things every day for which I am thankful (even if on a bad day it may just be churlish things like the sun came out and  I am feeling more organized) - it is a magical discipline. Then there is a second diary, just writing down any thoughts and feelings - I can moan about life in this one! But the third she recommends is  keeping an "Illustrated Discovery Journal".

This is not an art journal, it is a kind of scrapbook of anything and everything that interests me, I clip all sorts of bits and pieces and every so often I put all these clippings into a scrapbook, just Pritt-sticking them in. However, they have become a wonderful resource of ideas, images, poems and sayings, pretty greetings cards, tickets and theatre reviews.

So - when I was scratching my head for face number 1 today I had a flick through my scrapbooks - see above - and found a wonderful image of the Madonna and Child by Jean Fouquet and there was the inspiration!

Art Journal Every Day plus Strathmore Workshop 2 plus Dry Point Printing

This post is a real mix up because it uses lots of things I have been working with.

The inspiration is Julie Fei-Fan Balzer's wonderful Art Journal Every Day.

Sadly I haven't - but I have done much more journalling than I otherwise would have done.

I have had a busy time lately as our daughter came to stay with her 3 children, 6, 4 and 2 - it was great fun but there was no time for anything apart from the paddling pool, water table, tree house and bouncy castle! (A tiny garden one!!)

When they went home I started to catch up with my e-mails and  amongst the links to the latest Balzer Designs  posts I saw this great idea of journalling a month of faces:

"I am trying an art journaling experiment for June.  Normally I do a very diary-like version of art journaling every day.  As long as I sit down for a few minutes and say something about my day, I can tick it off of my "to do" list.  For the month of June I've decided to do something a little different.  My big daily art journal has been sent away, as a spread in it is being published.  I was trying to figure out what to do about that.  And the idea hit me square in the face. 

I have drawn a grid of thirty boxes in one of my other smaller journals.  And every day this month I will art journal by drawing a face in one of the boxes.  Some days I may include text.  Some days not.  Some days the faces may be colored.  Other days, just scribbly pencil marks. "  

- see http://balzerdesigns.typepad.com/balzer_designs -



This really hit me as I realised that I had some grids which I did for the Strathmore workshop 2 and had never used  - see first image - and also that I had a load of faces.

I have been doing an Edgar Allan Poe swap on ATCsforall.com so I had been drawing Aubrey Beardsley-like images for that.

THEN I went to my monthly Practice Your Printing Workshop at Unique Cottage  Studio. I hadn't had time to do anything new and was planning to play with plates I had already done.

When I got there - doh! - I found I had forgotten  my plates.

 But I did have my sketch book full of the Poe drawings.

So I used one of my swap drawings and etched it onto an acetate plate to use at the workshop.


It is a shameless plagiarism of Beardsley's  "Of a Neophyte and How the Black Art was Revealed unto him by the fiend Asomuel" .


I liked this as an image of the usher twins, Roderick and Madeline, and their impending doom.

The first image is the original drawing and the second is the first print off the etched plate (this reverses the image).

I wanted to try À la poupée, adding coloured backgrounds and chine-collée again
 

À la poupée

À la poupée describes the technique of using cotton buds to add printing ink to particular areas of the prepared plate, so I played with red ink. First time I did the twins with red lips and gave Madeline a red scarf and the second time gave Madeline a blue scarf and red hair/turban/ whatever it is!

It is - as you can see!- quite hard to make an accurate mark but I like the effect and will try this again

Another way of adding colour is to roll a second colour onto the prepared plate - again the experiment was not too successful!


The colour I used was much too dark to really see the printed image, so once more I shall try this again.

Chine-collée

I also had another go at  chine-collée  -  and once more the image was too pale again BUT we had no scrim available and the scrim does seem particularly important to force the ink into the etched lines as several of us had problems with under-inked prints....

I prepared the plate and added chocolate wrappers right side down plus a wonderful quote I found in an old Dumas book which was so appropriate "I depart, my brother, and nothing retains me here, I presume".
The wrong side of the collage papers faces up and has to be coated with Pritt Stick.

The print goes onto newsprint paper on the press and the damped printing paper goes face down on top of this and the collage is sandwiched together with the ink from the plate forcing through.

I came home with my prints and when I saw Julie Fei-Fan Balzer's faces prompt I decided they were an ideal chance to catch up with the Art Journal Every Day project as I could do a 5 day spread of faces and then carry on from 7th June doing a face a day (- which means I have one to do tomorrow!)

So I cut out my drawing and the prints and added them to the journal spread. The white of the faces looked very stark against the background so I tinted them with Pentel Aquash watercolour crayons (thanks again to Strathmore Workshops for putting me on to these!) - I love these because the pigment is intense, plus you can add the marks exactly where you want them, then use water to turn them into as subtle or intense an effect as you want.

I used image transfers for labelling and added a description of what I was trying to do in sepia artists' pens. 

So  - I have a double page spread that starts me on my month of faces, uses my Strathmore pages, and gives me a record of my printing experiments so that I can try to learn from past errors during the Printing Workshop on July 16th!

Strathmore Journal Workshop 3 - Building Your Visual Journal from the Page Up.

The latest Strathmore Journal workshop suggests starting with a painted background...

This page is page 2 of my Strathmore journal so I wanted it to fit in with the page 3 I had already done for Workshop 1 so I needed to keep to a blue/green/pink pallette.

I used acrylic washes and scrubbed some paint away and then dried the page with a heat gun.

Next I used the suggested spatter technique to get some extra detail; I managed to spatter quite a lot of my work surface but I like the effect (on the page that is)..

Then I tried out some more techniques from Roz Stendahl's workshop.

I liked the idea of tearing masking tape in half and then putting it together again right sides in to get a ragged edge - I did the diagonal stripes bottom left and all the page edges this way. I could not find the recommended artists' masking tape, so just had to use ordinary tape and be sure to move it off the page fast!

I needed to add some yellow to tie the page together with page 3 so I used yellow for the page edges.

I used stencils to make the rectangles on the page, dabbbing into the stencil with stamp pads. Then I used the water colour crayons from Workshop 2 to give each frame a yellow border.

Image transfers have given my Journal a name - DISCOVERY JOURNAL - and the left hand rectangles have my journalled intentions, which are to use this journal to try out lots of different techniques.It now fits in with the ideas on page 1 (previous post) and also with the Inspirations and Discover text on page 3.

I also added an apt quote from Marcel Proust, in the bottom rectangle and then image transferred photocopies of  my romantic ladies I drew for my printing course.  This refers back to  reusing work  I have already done in my journals (Workshop 1).

Although the techniques are completely different I think Page 2 goes well together with Page 3 so I have finally filled in the blanks! And I think pages 1, 2 and 3 now have a theme as well as using lots of new techniques I have been learning from the Workshops.

Rescuing an Art Journal Page

A RETURN TO

Workshop 1 Recycled Journal Pages * 

I tried the Strathmore Workshop 1 - using recycled journal pages - and I was very unhappy with my first attempt.

The colours were dark and depressing so I abandoned the page and continued on into the journal.

However, this page was the first page in the journal and it had been bothering me every time I opened the book - there was gloomy, miserable page 1, and then overleaf (actually page 3) there was a brighter page talking about inspiration.

And I was far too mean to cut the page out!



At the same time, I wanted to work on a journal prompt from my lovely art journalling group on www.atcsforall.com.

It was a quote:

"Oh, the places you will go!" from Dr.Seuss.


And suddenly I was inspired! What a great phrase to start my journal with, especially as this is the one I am using to try all the new techniques I have been learning from The Strathmore Workshops and from the journalling group.

So I used acrylic washes to lighten and brighten the page and used some black fine liner pen to emphasise some of the eyes and faces.

Then I used the black pen in a stencil to write the Seuss quote and filled it in with a white pen. I added some vintagey photos with an emphasis on eyes and looking, outlined the eyes with my black pen, then softened the effect with some thin acrylic.

Then I added a great quote I found on the internet about the future and what kind of place it is - which fits in with the Dr. Seuss quote really well - and I now have not only rescued a really horrible page, but I have an inspiring opening page for my whole journal.

Next I am using the ideas from latest Strathmore Workshop 3 to create an interesting background for a journal page 2 which I am hoping  will complement the existing page 3....

More Dry Point printing and Chine-collé

On Friday  I went to practice dry point and chine-collé  at the Unique Farm Cottage Studios near my home in Lincolnshire UK.

Because the studios have a printing press there all the time they are going to do monthly untutored sessions for £10 a session and the idea is that all the materials - papers  and inks etc -  will be there and the people who are attending help one another.

Luckily there was one attendee in particular who was very experienced, which was just as well as it is amazing how much I had forgottten - another reason for keeping the information correctly in my brain by writing it down in  this blog!

I also prepared plates in advance this time.

    For a total of £20.66 I went to Great Art  and I bought 2 packets of 10 Rhenalon Boards, 0.5mm, 11 x 15 cm  (approx 4" x 6" )  and 4 etching needles.

The Rhenalon Boards are like the clear acetate sheets I used at the tutored  workshop but they are a little thicker. I find I prefer them because there is less likelihood of cross hatching so vigorously that I go through the sheet and have to repair it with masking tape - like I did with my butterfly lady in the previous blog. She spent the day looking like a pirate with an eye patch!

The etching needles are one fine tip, one  bold tip, one oblique oval and one four sided oblique. I cannot claim to have exhausted all the opportunites with these! But I traced some of my mermaids on to the Rhenalon Boards and tried a variety of shading. 

The inks this time were oil based, a bit messier and harder to use, but there is a great advantage in that the prints can be over painted with water based paints. I used wet wipes to clean me and the plates as soap and water did not do much - also I was told that you can use cooking oil to clean up with...

I made a couple of prints with mermaidy green ink - and I shall have a go at adding extra water colour washes to these.

 

Then I had another try at Chine-collé.

I prepared the plate as usual, this time with black ink.


I had a mixture of green tones of paper and some old books to cut up for text. I also had green tissue paper and some gold paper off an Easter egg (which we had to eat of course - yum!)

Then I used a variety of papers and text right side down with prit-stick glue on the reverse (facing upwards)  -

There has to be a method of placing the glued papers down onto the plate without sticking myself to them with the glue!

I found the thin turquoise tissue paper was by far the worst!

The prepared plate goes on to the printing press. Newsprint is laid down first, then the plate - facing upwards - is added, then dampened printing paper is laid over the print, with more newsprint on top.

This goes through the press and, because of the glue, the collage papers become part of the print and the ink shows through the collaged papers.

The final print uses red ink and I left lots of ink on the plate so there was a lot of colour from the ink

Then I used tissue paper for "waves" - unfortunately some of these lifted during printing leaving lighter areas.

Luckily I really liked the final effect! When I got home I used a layer of matt acrylic medium to make sure all the "waves" were securely fixed to the print.

I love this technique and will try more next time  - probably planning the papers to add beforehand -  although I do enjoy the happy accidents!