My Art Journaling Journey... so far.

As I seem to have shared so many of my art journal pages recently, I thought it was time to discuss what can be used as an art journal.  The simple answer is... anything can be used for art journaling; from diaries and cheap notebooks, to expensive products created with art journaling and mixed media in mind. In this post, I am not going to look into ways of creating your own art journal, as there are so many methods.  For example, you can make individual pages from card or paper with grunge board as a cover and hold everything together with book rings.  You can even use heavy weight acetate or acrylic to make pages.  The creation of junk journals from old books, where the insides can be removed and replaced with home made signatures is a whole new post, and there are many more experts with experience in this area than me. 

Art Journal Prompts Week 5: Take Two

I decided to start another art journal in my bargain buy from The Works; an 8" x 8" wire bound kraft card scrapbook.  It only cost me £3 so I've decided to work on every other page and glue the sheets together to make them more robust.  This journal will be used for the weekly 'art journal prompts' from the Facebook group of the same name.  As I'm late for the party this year, I decided to dip in and have actually started with week 5: Take Two.
As the pages are made from kraft card, I decided to gesso the centre of the page, but deliberately left the edges bare.  This would allow me to add colour without the base showing through and keep the interest of the kraft card border.




The next step was to stamp the focal point.  I have had this stamp set for quite a while; it is from the Little Bit Sketchy range designed by Sheena Douglass and is called 'Just the Two of Us'.  Although the image is of a boy and a girl, I have a twin sister and there are photos of us sitting on the beach together wearing our red swimming costumes when we were little.  Although the photos I have are in black and white, both the prompt and the image brought back memories.  The image was stamped using Jet Black Archival ink and then painted over with Pebeo drawing gum to protect it while I worked on the background.
For the sand I used Fossilized Amber and Mustard Seed distress paint.  Once some had been dabbed on, I moved the paint around with my fingers, blending it out over the gessoed area onto the bare kraft card.  For the sky, I used Sailboat Blue and Cloudy Blue Adirondack paint and the same method to create the blend that I wanted.  Where the gesso showed through it was perfect to give the feeling of sky.  Once the background had been dried off, I used a Versamark ink pad and detail white embossing powder to add the sentiment from the same stamp set.  I then rubbed the drawing gum off the focal image.
I usually use distress markers or pens with a water brush to colour my stamped images, but I wasn't happy with the effect on gessoed kraft card.  Instead I decided to use Distress and Adirondack paints. I gave the little boy a slight touch of the sun by going over the intitial layer of Antique Linen and Tattered Rose mixed together with some areas using Worn Lipstick.  He is wearing Candied Apple trunks and his hair is a blend of Gathered Twigs and Ground Espresso (as is the girl's skin).  The girl's hair is a blend of Fossilized Amber and Mustard Seed to match the sand and she is wearing a Sailboat Blue swimming costume to tie in with the sky.  I considered the page finished at this point.