Multi-Media Art Journal 1 – Layout 2 – Part 21 – Memento Ink Tuxedo Black, White Gel Pen & Wink of Stella Glitter Pen Details

After another long, hard night at work and then coming home and completing my daily chores, I eventually sat down as I really wanted to finish this multimedia art journal layout. As my younger brother, who is living with me at the moment, was cooking pancakes from scratch, I zoned out by going over the black lines of the antique clock faces with my Memento Tuxedo Black Ink Marker Pen.

The side of my little finger is covered in black ink because I kept touching it while it was still wet and smudged it in a couple places. I tried to fix it up as best I could. I was a bit confused where some of the lines were going on the smaller clocks so fudged my way through that as best I could as well. I decided to add a black border around the large clock in the middle and the smaller clocks. The other clock face to the left-hand side had the border already, I simply traced over it.

I thought it looked a lot better with just this detail. But then I was thinking I wanted to try and bring the clouds out a littler more. So I went around each of the clouds with a white gel pen creating some faux stitching. It didn’t really show up too well in the photo though.

While I still had the white gel pen in hand, I thought… why not add some white highlights to the clock faces? So I traced over pattern on the clock face that had become so faded that I could barely see it because of the printer ink, the Tim Holtz Distress Ink and then all the washes of acrylic paint. I loved how it came out though! I really think that it added that little something extra that I was looking for.

And then finally, on the middle clock face again, I went over the pattern with the silver Wink of Stella glitter pen. Because the pen has liquid and there’s ink and paint on the clock face the tip of my Wink of Stella pen turned blue. But I just did a couple strokes on a plain piece of paper and it removed the ink and returned to normal again – I was relieved.

I’m now calling this complete and I really love how this finally turned out!

…Oh and by the way if you were wondering, the pancakes my brother cooked were delicious!

Multi-Media Art Journal 1 – Layout 2 – Part 20 – Connector Pens Make a Comeback

I had left this alone for a while even though I felt it wasn’t quite finished. Finally I sat down for five minutes (probably a bit longer but it seemed like only five minutes) to do a little more work on this multimedia art journal layout. It wasn’t a lot; it really was a little.

I grabbed my blue Faber Castell Connector Pens again and re-scribbled the borders that had been covered up when the antique clock faces were adhered using Faber Castell Gel Medium. I used the same technique as last time where I would use my finger to rub and blend the Connector Pen’s ink and then do some more scribbles over the top; thus continuing the messy effect.

Because I had used my finger to rub the ink, the ink had transferred and stained my finger. It was kind of funny at the time because my younger brother was listening to a 90’s music playlist and that song, ‘I’m Blue Dabadee’ was playing.

Multi-Media Art Journal 1 – Layout 2 – Part 19 – Adhering the Quote & Clouds

I forgot to mention in the previous post that it took aaaages to pop all the darker orange letters out. I think it was quite serendipitous actually as I had splurged, quite naughtily and against my will (but not really), and purchased a whole bunch of letter sets and washi tape from Craft Online for one of their Super Saver Saturday Sales.

And I had ordered the clearance Basic Grey alphabet sets from the Green at Heart and Picadilly collections. Bargain Prices! I love it. The Green at Heart collection is the cardboard alphabet set that took quite a while to punch all the letters out and arrange on the page. And the light orange letters that are flat are from the Picadilly collection.

The order had arrived just before the idea came to me to do the quote in orange.

I laid the quote out in three different ways trying to figure out how I wanted it to look and where it would look best and I had to try and fit in the clouds and not cover up too much of the clocks. So that was probably the hardest and most time consuming task I had had so far… until…

…It came to adhering the letters. The glue on the back of the of the letters is just not enough when it comes to an art journal so I needed to use gel medium. Every. Single. Letter. I had to pick up, put gel medium, press the letter down. Pick up the next letter, put gel medium, press the letter down. Letter, letter, letter. Cloud! Just to mix things up a little. Haha, it was so tedious. I was glad I had a quiet night at work so I was able to adhere the whole lot with minimum interruptions from the phones.

I really, really love how it came out.

Again, I’m having thoughts of coming through again with some shadowing and using the Connector Pens to scribble the outline border.

Oh! And looking at the photo, I’ve just realized I haven’t adhered the dots for the three letter ‘i’s’. I’ll have to adhere those when I next get a chance. Although it took well over an hour to do, I still had a lot of fun with step and I’m so, so pleased with the result.

I can’t wait to continue this more and finally finish this second layout. Multimedia art journals are absolutely the best and I enjoy the process so much!

Multi-Media Art Journal 1 – Layout 2 – Part 18 – Drafting the Quote

It me a while, and another shift at work, but finally decided on the quote: ‘Never give up on a dream just because it will take a long time to accomplish’. I have so many goals and so little time so this is another quote that really resonates with me.

I came up with the idea of using orange letters after watching the Craftsy Course on Acrylic Color Mixing Made Easy with Carol McIntyre. I loved this course, I learned so much and I can’t wait to do all the ‘homework’.

In the course I learned about which colours look really bold against each other and one of the combinations was blue and orange. So I thought, if I really want my title or quote to pop, I should use orange letters.

And it does just that. I was really surprised by how good that orange looks against the blue.

Multi-Media Art Journal 1 – Layout 2 – Part 17 – Adhering the Clocks

I didn’t have any time to continue the art journal at home and I was excited to continue, so I bundled up my art journal and a minimal amount of supplies and took them to work with me.

I love the way the clocks turned out on the layout. I positioned the clocks where I wanted them and then adhered them using gel medium. Once the gel medium had dried, I tore the edges where the clock’s paper was hanging over the edge to fit in with the torn edges that were already there; I wanted to keep with the effect the whole way round the page.

I’m having thoughts about adding some shading to the page behind the clocks and going over the clock hands and numbers with black pen ink again to embolden that a bit more. And also thinking about going around the edges again using the Faber Castell Connector Pens in the blue to add the scribbled effect. Maybe also add some white gesso accents with some faded dots, but not sure if that’ll be too much.

I love just looking at it and thinking and having the page inspire me so much and bring so many feelings into my heart; definitely my favourite part of art.

Multi-Media Art Journal 1 – Layout 2 – Part 16 – Making a HUGE Mess

After I had used the Walnut Stain Tim Holtz Distress Ink on all the clock faces, I arranged them on the art journal and found I really didn’t like the contrast between the brown and the blue. The blue background was really bright and vibrant compared to the dull brown of the Walnut Stain Ink. I found that I had a similar problem when I created the tags for my first multimedia art journal layout.

The next step I tried was to use the Tim Holtz Salty Ocean hue Distress Ink and I went over a couple of the clock faces with that but it still didn’t have the effect that I was looked for and was still quite muted.

I solved the problem by creating a massive mess on my table with left over acrylic paint from some old paint-by-numbers. I used a heap of water to water the paint down and I went over the clock faces with a thin light blue paint wash.

I liked the way this looked and I tried a couple different paint washes and also had a lot of fun just painting the paper. There’s just something relaxing and fun about brush strokes and moving a paint brush around.

I still thought the clocks looked a little bland and I also thought it’d be really fun to add some paint splatters. This was REALLY messy! I accidentally started splattering the art journal and just about anything else that was nearby so I had to close the book up and move it away. It was so much fun! To anyone that has not tried paint splatters before, I highly recommend it. It is very therapeutic.

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I also used a little bit of gesso mixed in with some paint to create some lighter splatters and more texture. This was the best thing to do after a stressful night at work.

Multi-Media Art Journal 1 – Layout 2 – Part 15 – Distressing the Clock Pictures

So my first thought was to distress the clock faces using the Walnut Stain hue Tim Holtz Distress Ink. I find with my finger daubers it’s a little bit more difficult to get an even coverage but I don’t mind working with what I have or using the daubers as they are significantly cheaper than the Tim Holtz Blending Tools. I also found that the paper kept flipping up when I was rubbing so I had to work around that hiccup as well.

Looking at the clock face, I thought the black printer ink looked really faded so I went over it with my Memento Tuxedo Black Ink Pen.

To get that much deeper looking black. I repeated this on all the clock faces I printed.

Multi-Media Art Journal 1 – Layout 2 – Part 14 – Finding Clock Pictures

So I wanted to put some clocks in the art journal as I had an idea about what I wanted my quote to be about and I’m always running out of time to get things done.

At first my idea was to cut out clocks from magazines. I went through a House & Home magazine and found two very tiny clock pictures out of the entire magazine. People mustn’t have clocks in their houses these days. So then I was thinking stamps, I could buy some clock stamps. But most clock stamps were quite pricey and then I would have to wait for delivery and I just wasn’t keen to spend more money and have to wait before I could continue working on the art journal layout.

So finally I thought about printing clocks. I googled ‘antique clock face printables’ and I was quite surprised to find exactly what I was looking for in about four different clock face images. I simply copied them into a Microsoft Word Document and arranged them to the sizes I wanted and then I printed them out. I printed two copies of each clock face so that I could have some room for error in experimenting.

I was very happy to find the large quarter picture on an angle as it’s a little bit more interesting and just adds the right amount of pizzazz to all the front facing clock faces.

Multi-Media Art Journal 1 – Layout 2 – Part 13 – It’s A Very Blue Layout

So this is what the clouds look like at the top of the layout. They do kind of just blend in with all the other blue. I’m thinking I’m going to add some more highlights to the clouds and try and add some more sparkle to that silver lining. And I’m also thinking of making some outlines on the page itself to try and make the clouds stand out some more.

I don’t need them to stand out a lot as they are still going to be part of the background, I want the text to be the real contrasting effect to stand out from the background, but even so I do want the clouds to be a bit noticeable.

What do you think of the layout so far?

Multi-Media Art Journal 1 – Layout 2 – Part 12 – Every Cloud Has A Silver Lining

I used my Wink of Stella silver glitter pen to give each cloud a silver lining. I tried to catch the sparkly reflection in the little bit of morning light that was coming through the curtains in the kitchen. I didn’t want to turn lights on or open the windows as my younger brother is staying with me and he tends to sleep on the recliner in the lounge room instead of in the spare bedroom I have for him so I didn’t want to wake him up with too much light (open plan living). But I still wanted to do a bit of crafting before going to bed. Luckily it is a quiet craft, haha!