Comfortable Shoes Studio

New Items on Artfire

I loaded some new items up to my artfire shop. 2 more art covered journals filled with 100% cotton sketchbook paper and original art on the covers. 

I listed a dozen new jotter sets with mixed paper inside. The paper ranges from lined paper, graph paper, pink, blue, green, to all sorts of natural shades I usually use. I had a box, a large one, from 10 years of binding of various papers I just didn't have enough of to make a full book. I literally shuffled the pages together to mix them up, and used 15 sheets for each jotter, for a total of 60 pages. Each of these jotters is unique and the mix of papers is individual.

I also listed one NOS or new old stock hedgehog/ moleskine journal. It's covered in this old school leather that reminds me of those old time leather basketballs. I can't find this leather anymore and I used this last piece to make this book, back in 2007. The journal has sat in a wrapper, in a drawer since then. I considered using it, becuase I like the leather that much, but decided against it and listed it again. I've got it up for less than normal.

I also listed 2 more brand new hedgehogs, one with a chocolate brown leather cover filled with cream paper and another with a bomber jacket brown leather filled with pale green paper.

I also re-listed the palomino pencils. These are the last packages I have of the HB and 2b, my favorite sketching softness. After I finish with those I'll list some of the other pencils I have left over from my old website. (Does anyone remember when this used to be a website with stuff for sale? Me either.) 

You can follow the links in the text to any of the mentioned items, as always feel free to ask me any questions or for more picture if you're interested.

seriously limited edition one of a kind journals

I've been working on some special journals. What I've done is take one of the posters I make the jotters out of, cut it up into smaller pieces and then I've journaled on it. So each chunk looks like a giant page out of one of my journals, or is a giant journal sheet. It's what I've been working on over the last few days which explains the lack of real blogging, tweeting and facebooking I've been doing. I'm really excited about these journals.

I'm working on 4 of them right now or rather I've got 4 covers completely finished. So far I've got one book completely finished and one more almost done. They are filled with 50lb, 100% cotton bright white sketchbook paper, 200 pages of it and are stitched with a linking long stitch. I used bright red Irish linen thread for the stitching.

The journal art is sealed with clear acrylic varnish, that allows you to feel the texture of the art but wipe it clean with soap and water if you spill coffee on it, and the art should be undamaged.

I'm still working the details of the pricing out but they will eb listed on my artfire account this evening.

 

 

 

The journal picture is titled "Super Star." I've got more pictures up on my flickr page.

Rule #3 Be Wary of the Sales Pitch, but don't begrudge

Everybody wants to sell you something. You need 3 things to art journal:

1. Yourself.
2. A journal.
3. Something to write/draw/paint with.

It's that simple. You don't need every product ever made, though they are fun. Some of the most beautiful journals I"ve seen are black and white or made with a ink and one other media. If you like color all you need is something simple, marker,watercolor, crayons, you name it and you can add color. You don't neede every rubber stamp, ink pad, re-inker, paint or marker ever made. Pick a few and go with them.

There are free tutorials online. There is nothing wrong with paying for a tutorial, hell classes are fun. But you don't need to know how to make a page just like someone else to make a great journal. All you need is you, a journal and something to make marks with. Anything else is optional.

Rule #2 Pages Don't HAVE to be Pretty

That's right your pages don't need to be pretty. They can be ugly. You can leave them raw and "unfinished." I give you permission. Your pages can be:

Dirty
Dark
Ugly
Nasty
Angry
Black
White
Plain

The finished page will be beautiful in some manner. If you don't like it you can always go back to it, reuse it, gesso over it, collage it into another page, glue the pages together and further manipulate the page. 

Make it yours but don't hold it to anyone else's standard of beauty. Don't compare your pages to other people's pages. They are yours.

What I've done with the Spray Ink

Holy crap balls. I love the spray ink.I love the spattered effect you can get when you press the sprayer down partially, I love the fine mist I get when I press hard, and the layered effect and mixing when wet. It's all very very cool. Experimentation is key to learning how to use these. I learned that the ink reacts differently on raw paper versus gesso'ed pages or pages with acrylic on them. The colors are transparent (except the black) so whatever is under them shows through. this can make for some very cool effects.

On thing I learned through trial and error is that alcohol based inks ALWAYs lift through my gesso (Liquitex basic brand) so I always get a ghost. So how to fix that? It would lift through progressive layers of gesso or acrylics too. I have a solution which I'll share at the end of this post. First I'm going to share some recent pages from my journal.

 

IN this image I had gesso'ed and painted the left page, the written on it in sharpie. The black was really sitting on the surface and less of the image than I wanted. So I sprayed it with purple and blue ink and a squirt of plain alcohol, Then moved the inks around. Here I learned that even fully dried acrylic and gesso will soften a touch when these inks are applied heavily. (the right side is the completion of my gesso over sharpie post)

 

This page doesn't use any spray inks but an over lay of watercolor crayons wet down and wiped off and sand papering. I was going for a  dirty look on this page- dirty to express my rage...

 

This page started out yellow-green. I used some Tim Holtz masks, I'll write more about these at the end of this post. I sprayed over them with green, blue and a touch of black spray ink. I also used some rubber stamps with embossing powder. On the right I took on of the masked out shapes and used liquid embossing paint and heated it until it bubbled, burst and dried. I then added some spray ink, watercolor crayons  and colored pencil to give the gear shape a distressed rusted up piece of metal look. The blue black background was too dark to write on, so I hit it with a thin fast application of gesso. No blending and applied with a bristle brush. I used a texture tool to make some marks and stamped on lines for writing and wrote on the gesso with bright green sharpie. I sprayed the sharpie with plain ink, a lot to soften the color and blend it with the background. Then I wrote my entry and sprayed that as well. I then overlay some green and blue spray ink and let it completely blend on the top layer.

 

This page started out with a burgundy acrylic base that had been coated with black and brown watercolor crayons and wiped down for a distressed look. I then hit some areas with sand paper to further weather the page. I've used Tim Holtz masks on this page as well. There are several collaged elements and lots of spray ink and gesso. You'll notice it's shiney... I'll get to that in a minute.

 

This page started out with a background that was bright red in the center and burgundy around that. I drew on an anatomic heart with sharpie. I used rubber stamps and embossing power around the perimeter. I masked the heart out with post it notes and then put down some Tim Holtz masks. I sprayed the background with purple, blue and black spray inks. I sealed around the heart ( more on this later) and then brushed some gesso and yellow to give it that mandala/ mary look. 

 

This page started out gessoed and with acrylic. The colors I can't remember but I think burgundy. I glued on my collage elements, added gesso and sealed the elements I didn't want to get colored with the spray. I sprayed  a variety of colors and then manipulated then with water, alcohol and a rag. I wrote with a sharpie. I used some sand paper, added some little punch outs and then sealed the whole thing.

Okay so the sealant I'm using is something I had around the house, is pretty cheap, and is easy to use: Minwax Polycrylic. Yup. I had a can left over from a project I'd done a year ago and thought I"d give it a try. It looks like the acrylic varnish I have in a small squeeze bottle (that was a lot of money $4 for 2 oz), goes on milky but dries clear. I have semi gloss and it adds a nice shine to the page, the alcohol inks don't lift through it and can be scrubbed off of it with a little work and alcohol. Gesso sticks to it well, as to acrylic paints. Sharpie glides over it. The alochol inks if applied heavy lift while the polycrylic is wet but not once dry so you can see the kind of dragging muddy effect you can get in the next series of pictures.

Here's a pic with can, you can get it at Home Depot for about $5 for this half pint can (8oz).

 

Oh and the best thing about this stuff, is that as of yet, once it's dry, it doesn't seem to stick to itself. SO you CAN get gloss in your art journal without sticking pages!!!

 

This is the page after using a stencil with black spray ink, orange and yellow. I sealed some of the page and then brushed gesso over the whole thing. After it was dry I used my fine sand paper block to distress it and move through the layers a little. It will also give me a super smooth page to write on. While not glass smooth I could write on this page with a fountain pen with ease.

 

Okay a quick note about Tim Holtz masks. They come in super cool shapes-cobwebs, music, nice french curves, flourishes and gears, didn't I just tweet about wanting rubber stamps with gears? These masks will have to be close enough. I really like them. But the glue holds really well to raw paper but not to paper with acrylic paint on it or gesso. Also while made to work with alcohol inks they really don't like to sit in it or swim in it. I ruined the glue on one by dousing it in a heavy coat of spray ink when it was on a gessoed page. :( No worries I have spray mount and will fix it. But if you do get some of these be aware that the glue doesn't like a lot of alcohol AND doesn't stick well to gesso or acrylic. But the effects you can get are so cool. They aren't too expensive and are infinitely reusable, just pic up a can of spray mount when you buy them and save some heart ache.

Backgrounds: A Way to get past that Blank Page Part 1

Gesso.

It's a basic thing. I don't see it as a necessary start to all pages. Becuase it's just not. If you work with a heavier page you don't need it. It's nice, it stiffens the page and adds some texture. You can get gesso in a lot of colors now- black, clear, white various other colors. You can also mix regular white or clear gesso with colored acrylics to get any shade you want, and I'm going to tell you how to mix it with watercolor crayons later in this post.

I'm working in a great notebook my friend Jen made me for a Facebook craft exchange. It's a salvaged hardy boys mystery cover filled with recycled pages. the paper is a variety of weights- I assume around 18# and 20# bond paper, computer paper and the like Its cot some printed stuff on one side. This paper needs the love of gesso to stand up the the abuse I'm going to put it through.

So the first thing I do is get out my gesso. I use liquitex, its not too heavy and isn't too wet. It works for me. I put it on with a rather soft brush so I get a nice thin coat. The brush I'm using is a soft old watercolor wash brush, a cheap one that I've previously abused the hell out of.

thin coat done. Easy. I like to work on a bunch of pages at a time. I hate washing brushes. So I separate my pages with freezer paper or waxed if I have it, sheets of plastic, whatever I have on hand. I look at gesso'd and painted pages at this stage as part of the process, something to gain inspiration from.

Moving onto coloring the gesso. I grab my water color crayons and add a thin layer of crayon on, scribble it, no real pattern.

Here you wet your brush and thin the gesso just slightly, so it will wet the crayon and mix it. Spread it around and add more gesso until you get the color you like and the texture you want.

Coat a page with gesso, while still wet randomly drop a few drops of liquid latex paint (ore regular), just a few drops. And start brushing wildly around the page. Blend it in until you like it. I like to leave the areas of color unmixed. (I'm using making memories liquid acrylic. I snagged it on clearance with a set of sweet foam stamps. BUT it's not a bad liquid acrylic. and on clearance who can beat that price?)

All of these pages were done in about a 45 minute stretch of time. Sometimes I force myself to sit down with my journal and just color pages. It's relaxing and after a tough day at work, I need to unwind but I'm not in the frame of mine to draw, sketch or journal. Something that doesn't require thought like this, it allows me to meditate on relaxation, listen to some good music and really just enjoy a few moments in my own head with out a worry. Because really, how can I f*ck up gesso? (that's a rhetorical question and I had several art professors who were really neurotic about how gesso is applied.)

Next installment: Paint on a page, sandpaper, and watercolor crayons

Working on it...

Last night while toning some pages (that's what I call it after an art teacher who used to call coloring a canvas toning it) I decided to shoot some pictures of my process.

I did a few set ups:

• plain gesso
• gesso with watercolor crayons
• gesso and acrylic
• acrylic
• acrylic and watercolor crayon
• Gesso background with sharpie on top and gesso on sharpie

I'll put up a few posts with the pictures here, the pictures will only be here and NOT on my flickr stream. I"m going to shoot for Saturday to have those posts done and will post them starting then. I"ll do themm split up because they will be so image heavy.

Moonlight Chronicles

D.Price the hobo artist has been doing a 100 page zine for over 10 years now. The zine is simply amazing. Think of Everyday Matters by Danny Gregory but with a focus on travel. There's navel gazing insight, great drawings of places he's been descriptions of those places and some great photography. It's all good stuff.

You can see his website here.
While there take a look at the link for the free issue that is online.

Take a look at his etsy shop too where you can buy issues.

Some pics of Moonlight Chronicles:

Support an artist, buy his work, you'll be inspired, plus it's only $5. Seriously well worth it. I promise you won't be able to put it down. Think Everyday matters but 6 times a year.

Rebind it, when it pisses you off

So that book, the art journal that I've been working in? Yeah the one that was pissing me off? I did the rebind already, it didn't take to long and I removed some unworked signatures- 4 of them to be exact. Leaving me with only 3 untouched signatures left. I think that the real issue was that the thread stretched a lot. I've used the brown linen before and never had an issue but I've never had a book so loose before. Of course I over stuff the book with glued in pages and layers of acrylic making the books about twice as thick as when I started. I dind't really epect there to be an issue with it at all. but there was.

Anyway, here are the issues:






My solution:






All finished:

new arl journal- loose sheets in a folio

After finishing my old journal I decided I wanted to shift gears and try something new with my journal, so I made a folio and tore sheets of stonehenge to 5.5x7 inch sheets. I'm going to journal on loose sheets to see how i like it. It's not as portable as say a journal, but it does have the folio so it is contained. So far I like that I don't have to deal with or work around the crease in the page, I'm treating the pages as if they were spreads though, which is weird i have this option to work as if the journal is just sheets of paper but I'm choosing to work the sheets as if they were spreads instead of single sheets. I think for me it's a design option as well as simply how I've worked over the last few months with a journal.

I really do like  stonehenge paper for just about everything, it's thick, it's mostly smooth with just enough tooth, I can use colored pencils on it, acrylic, and gouache and it responds well to all of it. Not to mention that it comes in a nice array of colors. It also doesn't buckle or warp much when it's wet down with a ton of paint.

I did this pic as a redo of an image I did in my last journal. It was still pertinent to my life so A little reworking and a difference in colors a change in text, and a big difference in the "blood" the good thing about working loose is that I can do things on these "spreads" that I wasn't able to do in the journal, in that there is no way I could have made this image work well across a spread so when I did the other one in the book I made the knife up and down on the page, I think it works better at an angle.

You can see a hint of the text under the target. I was testing out how different inks work under the paint. I'll write about my tests in a later post. It's pretty specific though, about how the inks work under gesso.

Self explanatory, sometimes I do stupid shit. Sometimes I just forget about things and do stuff without thinking. Especially when things are going well I tend to foul the whole works up. There is text under the lines of blue and purple. Its also a bad self portrait, it doesn't look quite like me but I got the essence. Also a dunce cap- after I was just making fun of pointy hats in other peoples art. Here though, I'm using to point out I'm a dunce sometimes and I do stupid shit.