Art Journaling Basics – Art Journal from a Recycled Book

The second stop on our Artful Adventure into Art Journaling is learning how to recycle a book into an art journal.

Not only is it economical, it’s a very “green” thing to do! Read, watch, or do both! It’s up to you!  You can find the first episode here.

We have a thrift store nearby that always has an excellent selection of books, and I periodically stop in to see what there is to choose from. For this episode I stopped by and found a fun book by Erma Bombeck. I always loved her column and her take on looking at life with humor. The book was only 99 cents, and was a pink tag item. Pink tag items were half off today! So I picked up a hard back book for 50 cents. However, as I began to flip through the book, I decided I would rather read it before I turned it into an art journal. Yes, this is problem you may have when selecting books that you don’t own.  You may decide you want to read it first, and then you have to select something else.  I found another one that was a similar size and that I could live with taking it home to turn into a journal today! Actually, I think I read that book before! No wonder I didn’t mind turning it into a journal!

After you select your book, you need gesso.  That’s it!  If you want to use a brush or a sponge applicator, you may. However, I will warn you now, you will have to clean them!  So, I just prefer to use my hands to spread the gesso.  I use a liquid gesso, and it makes it so easy to smooth onto the pages.

Before you start applying gesso, you’ll want to thin your book down.  As you work through your art journal, you’ll be adding layers of paint, paper, and who knows what else!  So you’ll want to thin out some pages so there is actually room for your art journal pages to live within the covers, and still have a chance of closing it.

As you look through your book, there may be pages you want to keep free of gesso, and leave in the book.  That way, you can have some text backgrounds, or some titles or phrases peeking through that really “speak” to you.  You don’t have to, it’s just an idea. Again, I remind you, there is not a right or wrong way to art journal!

Now, you are ready to start weeding out pages and thinning down your book.Leave a few pages, and then take out 3 or 4. You can carefully tear them out, or use an craft knife to cut close to inside edge of the page.  Keep the ones you remove to use for text pages in your journal or for other projects.  Just repeat the process until you have made your way through the book.

Next, pour a little gesso on an open spread of 2 pages, and just smooth it out with your hand, brush, or applicator. Leave it open until it is dry. You may need to hold it open by clipping a bit of the edge with a clothes pin, tiny clamp, or binder clip. If you are in a hurry, you may like to use a heat tool to dry it.

You can take the bit that is left on your hand and smear it onto the next page, and it will act as adhesive and you can adhere two or three pages together to give more strength to the page.

That’s it! Acrylic gesso cleans up with water, so just clean up your hands or brushes with water!

The next stop on this art journaling journey will cover different adhesives we can use in our art journal for decoupage, collage techniques, or just sealing things down.  So stay on board, I’m sure you’ll want to know about them!

Oh, we’d love to have you show or tell us about your journal you create with this method! Feel free to connect in the comments, or over at the Artful Adventures Facebook group!

Until our next stop,

KS

Selecting Color Themes for Your Projects – Monochromatic

Artful Adventures Monochromatic Scrapbook PageCompanies that make suites of products for scrapbooking, card making, papercrafting, etc.; have pre-selected color themes for you, so you don’t even have to think about what to use.  However, what if you are purchasing items individually, or have left over product?  What do you have that those things will coordinate with?  It’s all about selecting a color theme!  That’s why a company’s product line looks great, and that’s how you can select colors that will work for you as well!

In the last post we discussed how to use the color wheel and use a triad color scheme for a project or scrapbook page.  Today,  let’s talk about a different way to select colors – the monochromatic color scheme.  You may think that a monochromatic color scheme is 50 shades of the same color.  That’s true!  However, when you move up and down the spectrum, you find that there is more to a monochromatic scheme than appearing to be all the same color.

Monochromatic Theme

The open circle is the coral color

For this scrapbook page, I wanted to use a background color that was based on Calypso Coral, but I wanted it to have a little bit different look and feel than the other colors I normally use with it. I picked that color on the color wheel, and look at the other variations that are up and down that line of color.

Here are the colors that pop up!

Coral Monochromatic Scheme

Monochromatic scheme using coral as the base color.

For some reason, every time I have tried to upload this color strip, it seems to alter the way the original colors appear!  One color appears to be more gray than it looks here.

Using a color scheme as a jumping off point for your project, you can then use what you have and take liberty with adjustments as needed.  Here is a layout using this method.  You’ll see that the paged is not strictly made using only these colors, but you can also see that the majority of the page is based very close to this.

For an easy way to help you create a monocromatic color scheme, here is great website to use: kuler.adobe.com  (See below this next photo for a video on how to use it!)  Once you try this method and link up your project here or over at our Facebook Artful Adventures Group!

Artful Adventures Monochromatic Scrapbook Page

Made for Mom with Love

1 sheet mini album Made for Mom with Love, Gift Ideas Hop. Join the journey to find some great ideas for gifts to give the moms on your list or create a list to give your loved ones of the things you would enjoy for yourself!  Welcome to the Don’t forget, there are some freebies to pick up along the way, too!

In this post:

  • I’ll tell you about easy little mini albums you can create from one sheet of paper (or even a digital version)
  • Show you a video on how to create one (even though it is for a different season, it still goes together the same way!)
  • Offer you printed directions and/or a digital layered PSD file
  • Link you to the next site in our special hop
  • Provide you with a list of all the hop participants

Let’s get started!

Here at Artful Adventures, I like to offer you ideas to kick it up a notch – without a lot of hassle!  Here is a special do-it-yourself kind of gift that lends itself well to any number of occasions.  By taking just one 12×12 inch sheet of double-sided paper, or card stock, you can easily create a special little mini-album. Just a few basic touches will make it special, but you can add whatever you’d like.  In other words, how simple or fancy you make it is all up to you!  You can add pictures, quotes, stickers, fibers, beads, buttons…..  there are endless possibilites.

Here is a look at a little mini album made from one sheet of paper.

1 sheet mini album

Here is the video to show you how to do it.

Just enter your info below to receive your copy of the written directions for the 12×12″ sheet, or for a digital layered PSD file.

 

Please visit each site on the hop to see the special deal they are offering. There is such a diversity of creative things any mother would love to receive in honor of Mother’s Day. Note: If you joined us somewhere along the way, please start HERE so you don’t miss a thing!  

Now Hop on over to visit Vi at Creative Threadz and see what she has for you! 

All Participants:

Lain at Layout a Day

Debbie at Scrap Me Quick Designs

Monica at Scrap Inspired

Melissa at Digital Scrapbooking HQ

Pam at Keeping Life Creative

Diane at Capadia Designs

Beth at Scrapping Wonders

Kelli at Use It Scrapbooking!

Jen at Jen Wright Designs

Alice at Scrapbook Wonderland

Gee Zee at Messtaken Identity

Cara at Let’s Learn with Cara Miller

Rebecca at Pictures to Scrapbook

Heather at NoExcuseScrapbooking 

Kristie at Artful Adventures  <— You are here now!

Watercolor Technique, Watercolor Pencils

Watercolor Pencil Technique with Blender Pen

Watercolor Pencil Technique with Blender Pen

Our Artful Adventure today takes us back to the land of watercolor techniques as we discover a couple of ways to use watercolor pencils.  It can be nice to have a few products that are easy to take with you for any number of reasons!  You may joining friends for some special arts and crafts time; or you may like to have something handy to take on a trip.  No matter what the reason, watercolor pencils are another great product to be able to take along. They don’t take much room and are not messy!

Today we’ll look at using watercolor pencils:

  • on a wet surface
  • with a water brush
  • with a blender pen

Be sure to use waterproof ink for stamping your image.  If you’ll be using a water brush, stamp on watercolor paper.  You can use the Whisper White cardstock for the blender pen technique; although it is on watercolor paper in the video.  NOTE:  The Hydrangea stamp is part of a set only available until 3/21/13.  Grab it if you like it!

Watercolor Pencil technique with water brush

Watercolor Pencil technique with water brush

Watercolor Pencil technique

Watercolor Pencil technique