Not Everything's a Success - And That's All Right

Art is about working out ideas.  And when they don't turn out as planned, you make do with the result.  

As I've mentioned many times before, I'm part of a journal exchange with my friend Lisa Busch of collagestuff.com.  I really can't say enough how valuable I find both her friendship AND her shop, which has tons of great collage supplies.  Moving on....

Because I've really made an effort to explore paint and stencils, I decided to do that with this spread in Lisa's journal.  I like to start out these days with layering pieces of vintage papers first, because when I do these spreads it's with no plan whatsoever.  Whatever happens, happens.  Some call this the "Wabi Sabi" way of doing things, but I just call it flying by the seat of my pants. 

I decided to first try spray misting paint on the papers but because I've been having trouble with the sprayers (purchased from dollar stores) not spraying properly I don't get the right effect, so instead I spray stuff in globs on the paper and then wipe it down with sponges.  I mixed several colors - I think gold, red, a little yellow, and white -- to get the peachy color.  It wasn't intentional, it just worked out that way.  You can still see the papers behind the paint.

Then I stenciled away in various colors.  Lisa will laugh because I've expressed a dislike of neon colors and these sort of have that look, don't they?  But they're not.

These are some of the paints I used - one of the spray bottles that doesn't spray right is top right corner.  Actually I'm finding it rather fun seeing what happens when the spray comes out (nor not).  One of the tubes is an offbrand that I purchased in a set from a job lot store.  It says it's Cobalt Blue but it definitely is not, more a light blue.  Which should be a cautionary tale about buying paint from a job lot store - but it's still very useful.  And part of imperfection.

One happy result from my painting is always the papers with spillover paint.  I tend to use USPS tyvek Priority Mail and Priority Express mailbags as backgrounds, and like to both rub off excess paint from stencils, brushes, and sponges.  Believe it or not, I've only recently started saving them.  Oh, and baby wipes.  Great for cleaning stencils, hands, palettes..... even palettes and stencils with old dried paint.  And you can use the dried painty ones for something too.

So once I finished painting the spread hung around for a couple of days while I decided what to do next.  I actually liked it as it was and in retrospect should have left it as is.  But I decided to screw it up by adding circle shapes in various patterns of blue from scrapbook paper.

Once I started, I realized I was making a mistake.  But I soldiered on because I wanted to see just how "bad" it might get.  And also because I started thinking about bubbles. At first, in an effort to save this page, I decided to try using a quote from a song I like, Colbie Caillat's "Bubbly" but when I read the lyrics, I realized that wasn't going to work.  I discovered the song's not about bubbles - I'd always heard the song but not the lyrics, and just assumed from the title that it was.

Oh well.  What next?  

Then I remembered the standard "I'm Always Blowing Bubbles," and I knew I had the theme that might make this into something that sort of works.  And here's the finished result

It's OK.  It turned into an experiment in using shapes.  I know now that next time I should use fewer shapes to allow more of the painted page to show through, and I should probably use an actual pattern to make them float.  

In any case, it's imperfect, it's sort of interesting, and I'm glad I did it even if it didn't turn out particularly great (in my opinion anyway).

What do you think?

later, 
Lin

What to Say, What to Say?

There are those I know who would never believe this, but sometimes I am at a loss for words.  I can't think of anything to write about that might interest you, so I'm going to be lazy and share a couple of art journal pages I just did last week.

One thing to note about the art journal pages is that I am playing around with things and it's not intended to be 'great art' - whatever that is.  

First I have a page that was completed as part of a 'naive art' challenge on my Art Challenge FB group.  You can find out more about 'naive art' (also known as 'primitive' or 'outsider') here.

This became purely fun because I really wanted to play.  The background of the page is a lovely purple color that I created for another journal page.  I had leftover paint so I used it up on the journal page

I'd wanted to play with making flowers out of the zillions of shapes I've cut out over the years because I always meant to do something with them.  I glued some together to create the flowers, added a little dot of paper in the middle, then cut out tiny, tiny little strips from various papers to create the stems and leaves.  To make it even more fun, the flower on the left has colors not at all usually found in a flower.

This is something else I'd like to recreate on a larger canvas somehow.

You'll notice the sunflower paper in the upper left corner - I decided that I wanted to make a sun but not a traditional sun.  I had a doily showing sunflowers so I thought that'd be a fun way to do it.

Another journal page again started with left over paint, then I added stencil impressions just to make some kind of abstract.  I'm not sure if I'm going to do anything else with this page.  I kind of like it as it is.

The final journal page I want to share with you also started with the same leftover paint as above, and I had in mind to continue with the stencils.  Except that I kept doing it 'wrong' (although there is really nothing 'wrong' in art, people say.)  I just kept blotching the stencils, creating blobs of paint that, to me at least, looked terrible.

So I decided to save it by gluing vintage papers.  Great, wonderful.  Then I discovered that I'd glued the papers upside down.  

Whoops!  So what could I do to salvage things?

I decided to add two women's images.  And I've titled it "She looked at the world upside down."  This is another that I may recreate as I like the concept quite a lot.

There you have it.  For a day when I'm speechless, I've still written a lot.

later,
lin