Experimental Journal

Acrylic gelatin print on canvas
9.75” x 11” album cover

Looking through some of my collage and journal-making books, I felt like doing something quite different. I remembered a blank “Just-the-Pieces” album I’d put together with the gelatin print cover. The pages are sturdy black cardstock, intended to hold photographs. Last year,

Andrea Platt demonstrated some wonderful drawings she did on black paper using colored pencils and gel pens and-–YES!—that’s what I decided to try!

Appropriating part of a magazine cover having a wonderful array of blues and greens, I cut and glued that to the first page and began playing with the colored pencils. It is truly amazing how the black page is so utterly different and how it becomes part of the design.

I used green, blue, and white colored pencils with some gold metallic gel pen highlights. Nothing was precise or planned but the squiggles and lines and blips were mark-making of the highest form of fun! It was very relaxing, too, just doodling in different colors and allowing the strong black background speak for itself.

Fire Dancer

Fire Dancer

9" x 12"

acrylic on paper

Back to painting this week, I was trying a technique in Mary Todd Beam’s new book The Creative Edge: Exercises to Celebrate Your Creative Self using pieces of plastic to make rock-like texture. When I tilted this first try, I immediately saw a figure, perhaps a tribal dancer wearing an elaborate animal costume, holding a flaming torch.

Right now, I am of two minds—add some more defining facial features (but I'm not confident or comfortable drawing people!) or leave it as an abstract figure.

What do you think?

April Fake Journal Ends

The International Fake Journal Month is over and so is Ashling's journal. It has been wonderful thinking about my character's life and sketching in her journal last month.

I will miss hearing about her life in a small town in Ireland, back in 1961.

But, there is some room left unfinished in the little green journal where black pen sketches and longhand written entries graced the slightly-textured buff colored pages. The door is left ajar, in case she has more to share or draw.