Painted Journal Pages

As I mentioned in my previous post, I've been playing around with paint up in my art room over the past week or two.  I was re-reading through books like Daring Adventures in Paint by Mati Rose McDonough and Painted Pages by Sarah Ahearn Bellemare, and there was no way I could look through all those photos and techniques, and not pick up some painting tools of my own!

To get myself back into the painting "groove," I pulled out the tried and true tools for making colorful background pages in a journal that was not in the least intended for wet media:  a 5x7 notebook with thin brown kraft-paper by Paperchase.  First came the bubble wrap, with some scallops and swirls with a paintbrush:

On another page, I played around with a brayer and different colored craft paints, and then it got the bubble wrap treatment, too:

Then I used a fabric doily as a stencil for this page:

I scratched into my layered acrylic paints on the page, which is something I never thought I liked the look of, but I kind of do like it here:

I love making circles (maybe a little too much) with milk bottle lids:

And there is always the trusty outdated credit card for making straight lines and grid lines on the page:

After using a brayer to apply some paint layers to this page, I used one of my favorite stencils to create the top border:

And, of course, a page with sewing pattern scraps adhered with gel medium:

I decided to try a "poor man's gelli print" on a couple of pages by applying paint over a stencil onto a plastic placemat using a sponge applicator:

It's definitely not perfect, but it was fun to try.  (And it led me to put a Gelli plate on my last-minute Christmas wish list!)

Finally, I used that same sponge applicator to make some solid circles on a multi-layered background:

I may have gotten just a little too carried away, because all the paint build-up on my notebook's spiral binding is making it virtually impossible to get the book closed again, especially the thick cardboard cover!

Without a lot of coaxing, this is about as far as I can get it closed:

That's a task for another day; right now I need it open anyway!

Probably even prettier than the pages themselves are the palette papers I placed underneath my notebook to set out all my paint for brayering, dabbing, and mixing!

Initially, after watching some videos by Roben-Marie Smith and her Art to the 5th cohort, I thought I might use these pages as the basis for a Documented Life 2015 project.  Now I am thinking I would like to use them as the backgrounds for some drawings and paintings, and I'm gathering ideas for what those might look like in my sketchbook.

 

I'll keep you posted!

 

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Come back by soon, because I will be showing you a very cool painting effect using rubber cement, watercolors, and a black Sharpie fine-tip pen!