Wednesday 13 December 2017

Art Journals: A lesson in patience and resistance!

Last month's Patreon saw Anna demonstrating the use of masking fluids and wax crayons to create resist art. Now, I haven't created anything using these techniques since I was in primary school, and only then it was with kid eat proof paint and crayons. So I was super keen to get going, so much so that I forgot to follow one of crafting's golden rules namely that of washing your paintbrush after use. So in this case washing it after using the masking fluid....something Anna also mentions in the video!

So after a few hiccups and a new brush or two - I did eventually purchase a Molotow Pen which I found a lot easier to use - I kind of got the hang of it. Then I thought I'd be a little more adventurous with it. My initial experiments saw me working mostly with watercolour paints on watercolour paper, so I wanted to try using some other mediums to see what results I could achieve.

Here I've used the Molotow Pen to create a couple of quick doodles of Christmassy symbols....I've been trying to keep the festive mood in the house by listening to Christmas Jingles, my festive vibe is ebbing and flowing at the minute...bah! 



I dug out my Cosmic Shimmer Pixie Powders, at this point I must admit I have no idea how this will turn out or whether the masking fluid will react with the mica powder, but what the heck. I'm having fun and that's what's important here!



So now I'm going to fail to follow another golden rule....that of patience. Something I'm never going to master, haha. So I should have left the paper longer to dry....but I didn't and in my rush to see the results I ripped it.

Interestingly the reverse of the page has some rather cool markings and you can just about make out where the resist fluid was...I'll take that as a win!



Christmas Pud...because who doesn't love Christmas pud! So I figured after my not so successful trial with the shimmer powders and whilst waiting for the rest of the page to dry I'd add another little doodle to the bottom. 



The blending kinda came about by mistake. I wasn't paying a great deal of attention (I was busy wailing away to tunes) and I dropped a huge green dollop so I turned it around by blobbing and sploshing on more paint. I had intended to do some nice shading and shaping, so let's call it an organic development!




In most of my sketchbook/art journaling inserts I tend to slip black and coloured card between my watercolour and mixed media papers as I like to do a lot of work with chalks and pastels. Alongside my pud and snowflakes page was black card. Again I really wasn't sure how this was going to turn out as a) I hadn't tried the resist fluid on the card b) I wasn't entirely sure how well the pearlescent paints were going to perform on such a dark backdrop and c) I couldn't really tell where I was going or where I had already drawn with the pen. It was a sort of stab in the dark. 


I decided to literally cover the page with blues, whites and grey in the hopes of creating enough contrast with the black lines created by the resist pen. This time I let it dry whilst I wrote this blog post....so currently I don't know whether I'll be writing a success story or another mishap!


....ta da!!

I think it turned out rather well considering :)

I feel like I should have learnt some lessons here, about patience and intuition in regards to creating artwork, and to some extent it is probably true for the latter part, but I don't think patience will ever be my thing haha. I'm off to relive my childhood and dig out my crayons!

Till next time people :) x 

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