I still do art journals

At least I'm still doing the art journal exchange with my friend Lisa Busch of Collagestuff.com.  If you do any kind of mixed media art or collage art, you need to check out her site.  Seriously.  I buy from her at least once a month if I can.  In fact, the stencils I use come from her shop.

As I was saying, Lisa and I exchange journals about every two weeks and I want to show you what I did with one of the spreads.  Actually what we do is send both journals at once to each other, then the other sends them back.

I started out by covering a set of pages in my journal with various papers.

After doing that, I had intended to simply add images and 3D embellishments, but then I decided to go back to using paint, which I'd not been doing out of frustration with not being able to use stencils properly (too much paint, blurred images, etc).  This time I decided to try spraying the paint on and not care if I used too much paint.  This is something I've wanted to do with one of the new collages I'm working on, so I figured I'd experiment first in the journal.

I mixed 3 different paint colors with water in spray bottles - an off white, red oxide, and a metallic gold.  And spray I did

I used three stencils - swirls, letters, and diagonal lines, and just poured on the paint, with 2 of the stencils looking something like this, and I then decided to drip the excess paint onto the pages.  It took a little while afterwards to clean them in soapy water, which I did before the paint dried too much.

I decided to stop the painting at this stage.  But I wasn't sure what to do next, then I looked again at Lisa's journal page.  She'd done a, I think, lightheaded look at monsters.

My answer:

I used a quote by Stephen King that I'd heard at the end of a "Criminal Minds" episode (they do a quote at the beginning and end of each episode that applies to the story), which I verified elsewhere:  

"Monsters are real, and ghosts are real too.  

           They live inside us, and sometimes, they win."

Quite honestly, when I'd heard the quote recited on that episode it had a great impact as I deal with internal ghosts and monsters daily.  I've long wanted to use it in an art piece, and this seemed to be a good opportunity.

After adding the words, using 24 point Poor Richard as a font, the pages looked a bit empty, so I simply added buttons as an accent.  Red on each side.  I still thought it needed an added punch and I decided to use a contrasting color, an olive green, in the corners.

And I was satisfied.

What do you think?

later,
lin