I have been taking a class with Rebecca Vavic called “Mixed Media and Collage” which has been sparking my creativity.  From reading the info about the course and checking out Rebecca’s blog and flickr, I saw that we probably read the same blogs and mixed media books, but I do so much of my learning from books and the internet that I miss the crucial part - people.   People who are into the same things as you, people to make art with, people to talk about techniques and concepts with.

So, I’m enjoying the course and Rebecca is great.  She bought us all a journal to work in - she picked up a few hardcover books from the op shop for each of us to repurpose as an art journal.  Mine is a British Diving Manual from 1972.  See…

I have decided to leave the old journal behind for now and start fresh with this new book and a new outlook. While I do like a lot of the spreads in my first art journal, there is a lot that I don’t like so much.  I worked in that journal from April to October 2006 and then left it for almost two years.  I don’t even know why.  I recently did four entries in there (August 08) but I think it is time to move on from that book.  I am thinking that I should go back in and just gesso over the pages I don’t like and rework them into something better.  Then I think, maybe I should keep them for posterity, to see how far I’ve come but why keep something you don’t think much of?  Still thinking on that…

Anyway, I have started work in my new Diving into Art Journal already.  I want this book to be more visual and richer than my first art journal, positive and strong.  Sometimes I will work with the text or diagrams that are already in the book and sometimes I will just cover it over and make something new.  By the way, it’s a good idea to glue two pages together so that they are stronger and will hold the paint and glue without buckling.  There was a rather formal introduction to the diving manual and I inserted the word “journal” into the text to make it an introduction to my journal instead.  Stamps, watercolours, markers, papers and I have my first little spread.

The first paragraph reads: “INTRODUCTION:  This is a new style [ JOURNAL ] the layout of the contents has been altered and the text has been metricated.  Many members will want to know the reasons for these changes, therefore this is more in the nature of an Explanation than an Introduction.”  And it goes on from there, talking about diving regulations and metrication problems, but it’s that first paragraph that I thought was rather appropriate, at least once I stuck the word JOURNAL in there instead of “manual”.

I have to show you some backgrounds that I have been working on from the class.  We were supposed to bring in a stack of copy paper to work on for last week’s class, but I totally forgot to bring my paper and only remembered when I was about to pull into the carpark.  What to do?  I looked around in the (messy) car and saw some old sheets of paper that the kids had drawn on and thrown on the floor of the car.  There were a couple of old squashed paper planes to be unfolded and smoothed, forgotten school notes and some half done colouring-in pictures and a few other scribbles.  I gathered those up but there still wasn’t enough paper.  Then I thought, what about the map book?  A while back we bought a new street directory for the car but we kept the old dog-eared one in the back for the kids to look through as we drove.  They think they are helping me with the directions, especially Emma who can’t read yet but she forgets that detail.

Even though we were supposed to bring clean blank paper, I was more than happy that I had forgotten mine as I knew I had something much better.  So in class we used up our paper making monoprints and stamping and basically just making a mess with paints.  We squirted and scraped the paint.  We used stamps for interest and bubble wrap, plumbers tape, sequin waste and other things to provide texture.  We churned through our paper fast and were told not to be too concerned about what we were making, just to have fun and make some marks.  Looking at the papers drying, they didn’t look so great but it wasn’t the end…

The next step was to take our stack of dried painted pages and cut them all up into little squares or rectangles, say about 6-10cm (2-3 inches) in size, as you can see above.  Once they were cut up, they became interesting little pieces that reacted with the pieces placed next to them.

Next step is to (sorta) randomly stick the squares to a substrate (eg. large sheet of watercolour paper, canvas or even into the art journal) and make a pleasing arrangement.  I used canvases because I had them already.

Now for the next step.  After the piece is dry, go over it again with some stamps, rubons, scribbles or writing or anything else that takes your fancy.  Think about a theme or story you want to tell.  Think about a focal image and add that.  These paper squares are just the background for the art piece so keep adding things on top until you are done.

I am keeping the two canvases above to work on in the next class but I wanted to do a finished piece in my new art journal too.  Here it is:

Didn’t turn out too bad!  I will post more after next week’s class.

Thanks to all the lovely people who commented on my last post about microfinancing.  When I made the offer of putting $1 towards Kiva loans for every comment on that post, I was worried that someone would post the link somewhere and I would get 500 comments or something!  In the end,  I had 14 comments so I decided to put $25 in for good measure.  Mrs Mach Van thanks you.

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• Friday, November 21, 2008 -- handmade market (2)
• Saturday, November 8, 2008 -- more art (1)
• Monday, September 8, 2008 -- live more, do more (2)
• Friday, August 8, 2008 -- long neck (2)

tags: art, art journal