Art Journal Pages

 I finally took time to photograph more pages in the new journal I've been working in.   Working on this larger scale is sort of fun because it's easier to paint in it with acrylics.

These are the first pages.    Inside front cover is a little self portrait without glasses.     Then to challenge myself I made a wild 1st page.    

As you can probably tell, these two are  opposing pages..  I had cut the little doorways out of wax paper for a mask in another project, and had them just sitting around on my work table.    I liked that I could make them bend as I glued them in.  The girl in the bottle is something I created years ago for I don't even remember what project.   I love using up these old pieces.  The whole spread is based on the quote in the upper left that reads: Be not be the fourth friend of someone who had three before and lost them.     That was written by John Casper Lavater.      Very profound.   Not all the quotes I use are profound.   Some are just silliness found in odd places, like the Trader Joe's flyer.  LOL

These very dissimilar pages are two of my favs.   The tape girl was the simplest thing possible.   Yet, she has charm and life. The chicken I traced and painted then colored the head with colored pencils.      I was humming something from the Music Man while creating it, which led me to use a quote about gossip - remember the song in the music man where the girls sound like chickens cackling?   Quote by E. Watts.

The next two pages I'm showing which are not across from each other in the journal, are grouped here to show how simple a page can be, and then again, how much can be poured into a page. I've been watching Brain Games  on TV so the face here is to demonstrate how little information a brain needs to recognize a face.     A curved scrap had the shape of a cheek so it is a face with the addition of the glued in eyes and mouth.   Does it need a nose?    

The backgrounds of the pages are almost all done with scraping on craft paints with a credit card.    I'm using up old paints, and getting a good ground for whatever is going onto the pages.   I like the surface to work on much better than paste paper.     Quote by Danny Kaye.

Now, this was a cool exercise.    The scraped paints seemed to create images of horses.     I didn't want to outline them on the paint, so I inserted deli wrap over it and sketched in what I saw.    So, the deli wrap can be lifted and people can see if they see horses.   They  may see something entirely different, although one of my art pals said once she saw my sketch, that's all she could see.     

Tentacles!    Yes, it's an alien.     I thought the human form I used would be an interesting person, but then I found this quote about planets.     I figured it needed an alien, and what would be easier to do than add tentacles.

This is the final one to share tonite.   I traced the chicks and the iris, painted them in with acrylics and craft paint and found a quote to fill the space and send a message. If we do not permit the earth to produce beauty and joy, in the end it will not produce food either. 

I hope you are having some fun in your own art journals.    This spiral bound book is good because if I totally hate a page I can easily rip it out and throw it away.