(Another) Creative Outlet

Browsing here, I found this site, which offers a class (actually two)
in Art Journaling. I have always admired Art Journal work that others
do and am fascinated with this publication, but I've never actually
done it myself. This class looked like great fun so I couldn't resist
and signed up. The Art Journaling 102 class started last week. They
also offer a 101 class in archived format, so I crashed thru it last
weekend. It's been great fun and lord knows I have enough stash to do
this for forever. It actually has been quite liberating to realize
that all the crap I've been hoarding and collecting over the years NOW
CAN HAVE A PLACE TO LIVE. Ha. It's actually perfect for me... paint,
photography, typography, glue, paper, scissors.

And Water Soluble Oil Pastels. I know, sounds contradictory, but, amazingly, they are. And my oh my, are they fun.

Not that scrapbooking doesn't offer all that, but it's just on a different creative level.
I'm not sure why I've never done it before, I've had all the pieces
for a long time, just didn't quite know how to put them together in
this way, I guess.

Anyway, he's a few of my first attempts...

Lots and lots of layers of gesso, paint, pastels, paper, ink, more paint, etc. The gesso layers underneath have some texture that you really can't see in these photos.

This was using a stencil and playing with spray ink on gesso. My spray was pretty light and doesn't show in this photos too much but it created a nice watercolory look and has some nice puddle marks.

Using the stencil and paint. Then pastels and stamps.

Birthday card for a friend, found this cute train stencil at Hobby Lobby on clearance for .42 and couldn't pass it up! Waiting for paint to dry on above pages!

This started out completely something else and turned into this. I was trying to do a ink jet image transfer with gel medium in the upper left and that didn't turn out so good so I covered it with the blue train. The lower right image is a laser printer transfer with gel medium and it turned out OK. Then layers of pastels, watercolor pencils and paint. This page started on a non-gessoed kraft page.

Oh yeah, and the calendar thingy. When I was gessoing pages for the first time I had these coasters I did at the same time. I had gotten these little mini calendars from the scrapbook store but hadn't done anything with them yet. Ah-Ha. Here we go!

Backs:

This was a fun "get your feet wet" project!