New Tape and Painted Pages

I bought some washi tape from www.cutetape.com because when I saw it I had to have it, not really knowing how I planned to use it. I think I may use it to write on because I haven't found pens yet that write nicely on the acrylic painted backgrounds I have made. Not sure why, I thought sharpie wrote on anything? But I prefer acrylic paint to watercolor so will work around the problem until I find markers that work for me. Anyway, the tapes I picked are sort of consistent with the theme I am working with which is geographic:

 

There are many other colors and prints of tape to choose from and I already have a wish list for my next order! But I won't be needing any more for awhile. I am still working on page backgrounds! Another experiment every day. I haven't yet found the right combination of background papers, paint colors and transparency to achieve the look I want. But I have ended up with some interesting backgrounds even if I don't really like them that much. These are a few of my current dissatisfying experiments but the colors are brighter in person.

More Mixeling...

...is that a word? I guess it is now! I'm just having some digital collage fun. I'll have some more painted collage pages to post later and I just got some washi tape to use. Of course I got blue, green and six different grid prints. I think they will accent the map collage backgrounds I am preparing.

A Few More Painted Backgrounds

These were just fun to make:

How many practice pages...

...does it take until you no longer call it practice? I am still experimenting with making art journal pages. I have done at least a few dozen background pages so far but very few completed pages. I enjoy experimenting with different painted effects but I am less enthusiastic when it come to collage with paint. I am  comfortable with paint but I have never done collage before. I keep trying out different collage elements as the base layer and different paint surface layers. And all that practice paid off because I accidentally created a page I like that I think looks like denim!

 

I just threw a bunch of scrap papers down, slapped on some gesso and  then finished off with some phthalocyanine blue and said cool! Now I am going to try to recreate this effect with different papers for the underneath texture and maybe improve on this idea. Either way, this blue is my favorite color and the effect is interesting so I will end up with pages I can use later.

Digital Play

I'm posting this from my iPad. I have been playing with one of my favorite drawing apps called Scriblify. I has some very interesting dimensional brushes and various textures. It's fun just to explore the different kinds of effects I can achieve with it. This is a set of images I created from a simple butterfly drawing I made this evening. 

Original Drawing

Mixel Collage

I love playing in all the different artistic apps on my iPad and one I have been using a lot lately is Mixel. This is one of my recent collages.

Evolving Pages

I have been working on the pages to the File Folder Book I made a few weeks ago. The theme and cover for this art journal is geographic. I'm using pieces of maps and atlas pages to start with as background images for the pages.These are a few of the page beginnings. I plan on adding paint layers and then text or other images as I get inspired. But at least I have the front and back cover done!