I’m having an unusually busy week this week. I just spent 2 days double checking the accounts and submitting my tax return (Yay! Finally done!) and now I’ve had to switch gear to my other brain and get on with finishing a commission and some art pieces for a local gallery.
There’s been no art journaling this week with all this activity going on and it’s likely to remain that way for the weekend as there’s still lots to do and I’m teaching on Saturday and Monday, so I thought I’d drag one out from the vaults.
This page is from November 2003 when I was obsessed with monochromatic collages. I was trying to get a feel for the different tones and hues of one colour and the emotions particular colours evoke. It’s a stock page creation technique I fall back on a lot and I find it very therapeutic as I’m less attached to the outcome than the process itself. I did nothing to this page other than paint it red and then add snippets from magazines in red or that fit the theme of Love. I add a George Sands quote (I was very into Moulin Rouge at the time:-
"The greatest thing you’ll ever learn, is just to love and be loved in return."
Pick a colour, any colour. Pick two if you want. But no more than two.
Pick a one word theme, whether it goes with that colour or not.
Pull out magazine cuttings, patterned papers, paints, crayons etc all in that colour and get busy with the gluestick. Overlap as many images and words into the page as you possibly can.
Add words or a quote that fits the theme of your overall design when you’re done.
If you have trouble picking ‘randomly’ then close your eyes and pull a coloured pencil out of the pot.
If you get stuck with themes, write down words you like the sound of, would like to explore or that mean something to you. Enlist the other half, the kids, your mum, even the next door neighbour to tell you 3 random words off the top of their heads and add them to the list.
Never put a colour or word back in the pot. Even if you just did that colour and theme combination yesterday, the chances are you’ll do it differently today.
Taking inspiration from the material I was going to use for the dress I decided to make her blonde and blue-eyed. I wanted the cool blue to offset the fiery background and to have another cool tone to blend with the pink bird elements. Straight acrylic, block colours.
At this point I also decided that I needed to give the background a sort of ‘late summer in the wheatfield’ feel, with blossoms flying around and long grasses around her feet. I used waterproof ink in sepia and bright green with my foam stamps.
More background
I decided I needed to collage on the material to get a better idea of where I wanted to go with the rest of it.
I collaged on the material for the dress by tracing over the drawing, then transferring it to the material and cutting it out. Top tip – run some gel medium around the edges of the material straight away to prevent fraying, before you actually collage it. It’s a lot easier than trying to do it when it’s on the board. The dress is collaged on with gel medium and then coated in it as well to seal it. I re-drew her arms over the top rather than messing about with a gully and two parts of a dress. I covered them with gesso and redid the skin tone once it was dry. I forgot to take a picture of that part. I added more green translucent acrylic (plenty of glaze medium) to the bottom of the picture because it was looking too stark.
Material collage dress
Now the hat and face. I had a scrap of some Basic Grey scrapbook paper hanging around that matched the dress, so I collaged that on the same as I did for the dress. I edged it in brown and painted the underside of the hat in brown as well. I used clear gesso over the whole face area and added shading in prismacolor pencils, blending with a very light peach tone. I re-added any white highlights in white acrylic. Final detailing on the eyes, lips and hair was added with black waterproof pen, Sakura gel pens and acrylic paint.
Finishing the face
Finally I decided on the placement of the birds and cage and collaged them on with gel medium. I added colours to them with pencil and ink to add definition and an aged look. Finally I decided it looked a little top heavy and added some translucent tissue paper in green with a white dandelion clock motif to draw the eye to the bottom. I edged the bottom half in sepia ink and the top in a pink to match the birds. I blended it up the side with my finger while it was wet.
Adding the Bird elements
I may add little details here and there, possibly some writing. I haven’t put her necklace in that I drew in the initial sketch yet. I need it to sit on my easel for a few days until I decide if it’s really finished. I have toyed with adding eyelashes, paper flowers and/or ribbon on her hat, some tissue paper in the background, more birds and various other bits, but I quite like all the ‘white space’ and I don’t want to clutter it just for the sake of filling some of it up.
It needs to brew a while until I decide whether I’m done.
Here’s another painting I’ve been working on. I completed this part the week before last.
First, I drew the sketch outline in my notebook. i’d been mulling over how to use some birdcage scrapbook supplies I had bought and I liked the idea of combining the caged and flying birds with a summer theme. Then I re-drew the final image onto a 12×10″ canvas panel. I don’t use any fancy transfer method, I just redraw the image on the board.
Initial sketch and transfer
Next I painted the skin base. I use acrylic for my faces – 2 colours of peach with white. I put in basic shading and highlights at this stage. I rarely finish the face at this point, I like to decide on outfits and hair before I finalise her skin tone, eye and lip colour.
Painting in the skintones
But before I decide on clothing I do the background. I decided on an orangey-browny-green theme overall to match some fabric I wanted to use for the dress. The background is done in orange and yellow watercolour crayon, with a smidge of green near the bottom.
Watercolour background
Before I add any more background I painted in the dress. I used a bright green acrylic in one colour as it matched the material I wanted to use. This is just an under layer to get rid of the white. I’ve found some materials go semi-transparent once collaged and I don’t want white poking through.
Painted dress dress
At this point I couldn’t decide what to do with her hat or hair, so I popped it on the bookshelf where I could see it all the time and waited for inspiration to strike. I’m a firm believer that if at first you don’t succeed, it’s the universe telling you to go and do something else for a while.
Forcing yourself to finish a project that has no deadline, for no reason other than ‘to finish it’ is a disaster waiting to happen. There lies frustration, tears and throwing things across the room in a huff. Better to step back and disengage til you have an idea.
Like a lot of you I use beeswax in my mixed media work and I wanted a way to melt it that I could put it on with a brush. I already have a quilting iron, which works great but you can different effects brushing the beeswax on than you can with the iron. I only use small amounts at a time so a crock pot seemed like a waste of money and electricity and I wanted something a bit more convenient.
I tried to get a melt pot like you use for UTEE or a glue melt pot for melting the glue for hair extensions. Or even a wax melting pot like they use in salons for Brazilian wax. They are EXTORTIONATELY EXPENSIVE. Really, why would I pay £40 (that’s around $60USD) for something I’ll use for a few minutes once or twice a week? Do they think I’m barmy?
Well, I’m not. I’m part Gnomish. I will tinker until I find a better solution. Cue the Grand Beeswax Melting Experiment of 2010.
I have a ceramic oil burner that is 5 inches tall and is for burning essential oils in. You light a candle underneath and the oil gets hot but doesn’t boil and voila, scented room. I was never good at chemistry. I used to mix stuff til it was pretty colours, which is how I ended up in Art class instead of double science. Biology I was OK with because it was basically drawing diagrams but chemistry involved lethal chemicals and glass bottles and was generally not a good idea for me to be involved in. But I figured that since both oil and beeswax are easily heat-able but flammable, and since oil is safe to burn in this thing provided you don’t leave it to go dry, then it ought to be safe to melt beeswax in provided the beeswax flammability temperature of beeswax was not significantly lower than that of essential oil.
Do you know the flammability temperature of beeswax? Me either. So we’ll wear safety goggle shall we?
Anyways, I videoed the process to see what would happen. And I’m pleased to say the experiment was A TOTAL SUCCESS! Woot!
Step 1: I put a few chips of Beeswax pellets into the oil-burner, lit the candle and crossed my fingers while standing well back. Just in case.
Step 2: 3 minutes later…
Step3: 11 minutes later… I had added another teaspoon of chips to see how that went.
Final notes
Following on from this video I added another tablespoon of chips and left it to melt (I did use some of it at this point, I been waiting for some melted beeswax for my collage journal) and then I left it to burn, away from anything that might catch fire and in my line of sight.After 1 hour 10 minutes from the start of the experiment the beeswax was starting to evaporate (you could see the sides beginning to congeal as they cooled) but no sign of over heating, in fact it’s not even bubbling so I’m guessing it’s reached it’s highest temperature point and now will not burst into flames or anything.
My tea lights burn for 3 hours give or take, so I’m going to leave it burning (whilst keeping an eye on it of course) just to make sure that if I did accidentally leave some burning it would be ‘safe’ i.e. as safe as an unattended candle. I have cats and if they knocked this over they would really hurt themselves, so I have to be extra careful. But all in all this seems to have worked, so if you’re looking for an easy, quick and inexpensive way of melting a few bits of beeswax to paint with, then this might be something to look into. If nothing else it’s a good excuse to burn a lovely smelling candle.
Do remember if you try this at home, that just because you blow out the candle does not mean the beeswax magically becomes solid again. It takes about 5 minutes for the top to congeal and become solid. Also, this oil burner is now no good for anything else but beeswax, so don’t go using some lovely thing you have for making your room smell nice. Get a cheapo ceramic one from the hippy stall at the local market.
I am tempted now to try this (with a different oil burner) for UTEE just to see if it’s possible to use these things without the expense of a £40 melt pot. If you try it, link back in the comments and let me know how you get on.
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The videos in this post were recorded with iCamcorder on an iPhone 3G. If you’ve been considering upgrading to the iPhone 3GS just for video capability then I would suggest looking into this app. There’s a free version you can play with that records 15seconds, but I only used it once before paying the £1.19 for the full app. It’s a little buggy but it does work, especially for uploading to YouTube.
I used black gesso for the main figure, then painted the highlights in with white acrylic. I used waterproof black ink to stamp the numbers pattern on the background then coloured it with a red watercoluble crayon. The box on the left is black oil pastel, the writing is done with a fine black Pitt artists pen. The ‘fourth’ is done in vinyl Thickers in ‘Poolside’ font.
One of the things I’m trying to do this month with my art journal is do more sketching and drawing in it rather than collage work, which is what I default to when I’m being lazy. Sometimes I go weeks without feeling like I’ve actually created something so I want to try putting ideas into action in my art journal instead of doing rough notes and then leaving them to gather dust til I have time to paint it.
