Inspired to paint

When I posted a photo from my art journal yesterday I had nothing to say. I couldn’t write one single word. I wanted to write something, I wanted to post, to be seen, noticed, commented! I wanted to shout out – but I couldn’t say anything because I was feeling depressed and captured. I have such a hard time accepting those days!

But today I feel so much better.

This morning I had coffee in bed and finished reading a great book, and then I’ve been playing in my art journal almost all day!

I’m very inspired by Suzi Blu as you already know, and last night I watched Paulette Insall paint (don’t miss her video on youtube) and I just decided I need to paint too! Her paintings are so darn cool and beautiful! I’m inspired to try to make a video too, and I now have a deal with Lia to try vlogging, or at least make one video to upload. I’ll try.

I’m also inspired to use my acrylic paint for something other than messy backgrounds in my art journal! So, while sitting on the floor, listening to podcasts this afternoon, I did a painting in my art journal!

Voila!

Smilla is in the picture together with the girl (who is not me). I wanted her to have red hair, but I think I overdid everything in this painting/doodle/acrylic sketch. I just added layer after layer with paint! This is where I stopped:

For a first try I’m rather happy with it, even though it doesn’t look at all what I wanted to make, hehe. I doodled all over with a pen and one of my glittery gellyroll pens, added a bit of text and some collage elements.

The woman on the right page is a magazine picture that I painted with gesso.

This is how you do it: You cut out a face image from a magazine and then lightly paint watered down gesso over the face. You want to still be able to see the face underneath the white. Then fill in the areas with paint and make it a painting of your own. It?s fun to use strange colors and make the shadows green and the face blue for examle, but you can also do it more realistically.
Start with the lightest color and then add in shadows and darker details. This idea comes from the prompts of Wide Open: Inspiration and Techniques for Art Journaling on the Edge (Book & Card Kit) by Randi Feuerhelm-Watts, but I learned it from (Nancy’s blog), and I coloured mine with water soluble oil pastels (that I totally love).

Close up details. Messy as you can see. Acrylic paint is very different from painting with watercolours, those I’m much more familiar with. But acrylic paint can be really fun!

This is another page I made today:

It’s just random orange and pink patterns glued together, plus that awesome picture of gold fishes looking cross eyed! I love writing on magazine paper like that, it’s a simple but fun technique to use if you want to write in your diary or journal. Add a magazine photo that has a big chunk of space to write on and try it!

This spread is a couple of days old:

As on the goldfish page you can see my altered book’s (Nordamerika by Peter Farb) original b/w photos in this spread. I just didn’t want to block the view from this lion cat, he is mine! You see that dangerous look? Yesterday I took this spread with me to bed and wrote with a red ink pen on the left page, just random words between the big letters. Today I used paint on this page again and dabbed all over the red writing so that it almost disapeared. That felt great!

Actually this post felt great making, I hope you can feel it too? I feel lighter today, like some of my problems went away while I did these pages. Isn’t that the coolest thing about art?

Take care!