Catching up on some Art Journaling!

With the kid’s birthdays preparations taking over, I didn’t get much of a chance to catch you up on some of my latest art journaling pages. There haven’t been too many, but the ones that I do get in are always such a joy!

First of all, here are a couple of pages I’ve done for an Art Journaling Exchange a few of my friends and I have going! We are a group of online friends that have known each other for 10+ years!  We each have a “traveling” art journal that we mail around to each other. And we each make one or more art journaling pages into the other’s journals, then send it on to the next friend! For many in this group, this is their first art journaling adventure/project ever, which makes it even more exciting to see some of the creativity burst forth!

At the end we get our journal back with lots of amazing pages from friends!

It is such fun!
And another Dianne Duda inspired girl came to visit! All of Diann's girls are so cute! I think I want to be her when I grow up!

In this page I used the Gesso texturing process I describe here. It’s really fast becoming my favorite way to add some texture to my pages while still remaining flexible, in both method and actual page flexibility!

Then I did this one for another friend:

And while I was in the midst of making the kiddo’s birthday cakes, I had a sudden desire to do some watercolor painting, mostly because I saw a lovely painting of dandelions on pinterest that just totally reverberated with where I am at currently, energetically. Since I could neither find the original artist, nor a way to purchase it, I just had to recreate it!

Whoever did the original painting - THANK YOU for your contribution, talent and inspiration!

And re-create it I did! Amazingly, this painting happened unusually fast for me. I tend to fuss about paintings and they take me forever, but not this one! I was done in about 2 hours! It turned out to be a lovely mix of water color paints, ink and shimmer mist sprays!

Had I known how well this one might go, I might have started taking photos earlier, so I could take you through the process, especially since this has been the first time in many years that I broke out my colorless masking fluid!

But alas I only thought about that once I was almost done with the painting!

Unfortunately, as always, the shimmer mists don’t photograph well. They are all over the painting, but I also splattered them across the painting as a very last step. So all the dark little “dots” those are actually little gold shimmering splats.

And here it is just before I rubbed the masking fluid off:

And once I had rubbed it all off, even the discard looked so pretty and colorful with shimmers running through it, I kept on thinking that there had to be something I could do with it. Alas I ended trashing it anyway!

Once all the masking fluid was off, I filled in a few unintentional gaps with water color and then proceeded to splat some shimmering mist all over the picture.

All shimmer and spritz, color and joyful energy!