50 ways to leave your layer

Warning: there are a lot (and I mean a lot!) of photos in this post.

Last weekend I went to Art from the Heart in Harrogate for a weekend of two workshops led by Seth Apter.

The workshop on Saturday was '50 ways to leave your layer'.  We were given a Dylusions square journal and did one technique for each double page.  Some technique pages had more than one layer!

Smooshing - a type of monoprinting

Smooshing with others!   This works so much better with the black background rather than the white above.

Printing with texture

Splatter

Hidden background

Subtraction stencilling

Water splats!

Brayered

Two colours

Ombre

Free choice of techniques to do the cover.

On Sunday we did 'Mixed Media Mashup'.  We made one finished piece to take home using a variety of techniques following Seth's instructions.

My piece went from this first layer:

to this:

And in between were these layers:

Die cuts using Seth's Spellbinder Dies.

Auditioning the pieces

Improvements after advice from Seth

Added finishing touches

It was a fabulous full on weekend.  Thank you Seth.  Thanks to Art from the Heart for organising it and to my friend Carolyn who joined me for the weekend.

Well done if you've got this far.  I did warn you there were a lot of photos.

Thanks for stopping by.
Bernice

Colour Theory Journal

I have talked about colour theory and the start of my colour theory journal.  Today I'm going to show the work I have been doing in the colour journal.

However first I wanted to share this post with you: My Unique Colour Story.  This was a class I did at The Festival of Quilts last year and had forgotten about until I was looking for some photos for another blog post.

Today's post is a bit disjointed - sorry.  I feel like I'm just throwing bits at the page but I hope it will be helpful.

Here's a really useful website if you want to be able to identify the colours in your photograph to be able to turm it into art: Snap Your Colors. (Sorry about the quality of my example)

An interesting blog post I found Expressing with colour and another series of really good blog posts on colour theory.  And here's my Pinterest board.

And now back to my colour theory journal.   I have used different makes of paint which has worked better than I thought.  In the online class Pam Carriker suggests only using one make of paint but doing several of these journals for all the different paint makes that you have.  I probably won't ever do that but I may try it with my Inktense crayons and bars.

Front cover

Still lots of space to fill and colour wheels to complete.

I bought the class as an online video but I have just found a companion guide that is downloadable.

Thanks for stopping by.
Bernice

Continuing with colour theory

Last week I talked about colour theory and showed you a sneak peek of the journal I made from the Pam Carriker online class.

When I was preparing my journal I only had six of the colours I needed to make a colour wheel.  These are Dylusions acrylic paints.  For the journal I chose three colours - the instructions were for four colours.  I rarely do exactly what the tutor says.  Mind  you in this case it was that I didn't have the 4th colour.   I mixed the acrylic paint with some water in some spray bottles.

Remember the colours on the colour wheel last week?   The colours above are Squeezed Orange, Fresh Lime and London Blue.  According to my colour wheel they match Yellow-Orange, Yellow-Green and Blue respectively.  The other 3 colours I didn't use are Lemon Zest, Vibrant Turquoise and Crushed Grape which match Yellow, Blue-Green and Red-Violet.

Journal Preparation
I thought I had followed the instructions for putting the paint on the pages

but when I went back to the video I found I hadn't  So I did the backs of the papers the correct way.

When you fold the pages and sew the journal together you get spreads like this.

When I went to Art from the Heart I bought some of the missing colours and set about making my own colour wheel.  Ideally you would do this with only one make of paints and do separate colour wheels for all your different makes of paint.

I set the paints around my colour wheel and the red and Blue-Violet were wrong so I rummaged around and found some Golden paints that were okay.  In fact I might go through all the Golden paints I've got to see if I could do this exercise just with Golden.

Then I drew round a template to get the large circle and I found this piece of plastic canvas and worked out where the middle of the large circle was and measured where I needed to make my lines.

I used a pencil and ruler to draw the lines.

I made pencil notes of the paints as I painted in the segments

When the paints were dry I wrote the colours on the wheel and cut it out.

After I had made my colour wheel I decided I would use the other colour to make a page for the journal.  I'll show you that in my next post.

And look what I found on YouTube via Pinterest

Thanks for stopping by.
Bernice

Journal Cover

I don't usually decorate the covers of my journals until they are finished but last week I was watching a Ronda Palazzari video on Creative Jumpstart and it inspired me to the cover of the Dylusions journal I am using for Take Me Deeper and Logos365.

Here it is in its plain state.  This is the version that is slightly bigger than 11x8.

I glued some wooden butterflies onto the cover.

I painted over them with gesso.

I applied various colours of acrylic paint with a dry brush.  You can see the scissors holding the elastic up from the book.

At this point I didn't like how bright it was so I brushed on a light layer of gesso.

I painted the butterflies with turquoise pearlescent acrylic paint.

After 2 days of looking for the gilding flakes I eventually found them and glued them to the butterflies.

I thought the acrylic background looked to matte so I put two coats of Gloss Multi Medium over the top although you can't really tell in the photo!

I don't think it's finished but I shall leave it now until inspiration strikes again.  It may be that I only add the numbers 2015 to the bottom left hand corner.

Thanks for stopping by.
Bernice

Starting work in my 2015 Journal

Regular readers will know that I am using a Dylusions Journal for a monthly calendar, my Take Me Deeper devotional and my word for the year.

I described how I prepared my journal here.

I started with the January calendar.   I found some scrapbooking cardstock and cut narrow strips.

I stuck the strips down on the left hand page and on the flap on the right.

I put some clear gesso through a snowflake stencil.

I used 3 colours of Distress Ink over parts of the pages and took the colour off where the clear gesso was.  This technique works better with spray inks!

Using a punch I cut 31 flower shapes and then stamped the days of the week.

I stamped snowflakes with Archival Ink.

I stuck the flowers down and wrote the numbers on.   There isn't much room to write something for each day but to me that's a good thing!

Take Me Deeper and logos365 don't officially start until January 1st but I thought I would do my main word page.

I started by putting gesso over the page.  When that was dry I scraped 2 colours of acrylic paint onto the bottom third of the page.   I pressed a spider's web stencil into the wet paint in the hopes it would dry to look like parched earth.

At the top of the page I scraped modelling paste through a raindrop stencil.  I put a thin coat of two tones of blue acrylic paint over it.  However I forgot to take a photo of this stage.  The cracks didn't show up very well when the paint was dry so I stamped on it with Sepia Archival Ink.

I printed out the word thirst and stuck the letters front side onto a page of a Bible that I bought from a Dollar Store for the express purpose of using it in  my artwork.   I cut them out and stuck them onto my page.  When the glue was dry I drew turquoise lines inside the letters.

I printed out the verse from John 4:13 and stuck it onto my page.

Thanks for stopping by.
Bernice