Kickstart Your Art Days 5 & 6: Tea Time's Delicious!

Today is the sixth day of a Smeared and Smudged Forum challenge, Kickstart Your Art!, an Art Journal Every Day challenge.  We are given a prompt every morning and then have 24 hours to produce a journal page.

Yesterday's prompt was to use an organic medium.  I chose tea, mostly because all the coffee was gone by the time I started my page!

 I started with a wash of very strong tea, letting it run down the page.  I let that dry, then followed with two more successively darker washes of acrylic paint thinned with the tea, again letting it run down the page.

After yesterday's overblown piece, I tried to keep this simple, finishing with a stamp from A Day for Daisies and the hand-lettered word "Simplicity."

Today's prompt was to use a magazine or book page.

Since we always have cooking mags lying around, I cannibalized one of those, then added some collage elements and scribble-painting with a Gelato.  I finished with the stamps of the hand with chopsticks holding a shrimp, for an all-around foodie page; then added the word "Delicious!"  The shrimp doesn't exactly go with the bit dessert pic in the top left, but oh, well!

Kickstart Your Art Days 3 & 4: Fly Doodle

Today is the fourth day of a Smeared and Smudged Forum challenge, Kickstart Your Art!, an Art Journal Every Day challenge.  We are given a prompt every morning and then have 24 hours to produce a journal page.

Yesterday I didn't make it to the blogging stage of producing a journal page, so here is yesterday's page.  The prompt was to "Make a Collage."

This is a natural for me--I love making collages-gluing down bits and bobs of papers and tissue and then stamping and drawing over them.

Today's prompt was to "Doodle."  You would think that this would be simple, but I had a certain "look" in my head, and I just kept working and working at this page until it was OVERworked.  I like parts of it, but as a whole I think I probably should have stopped messing with it two or three stages ago.

Ah, well.  There's always tomorrow to try again.

Kickstart Your Art: Day 2 "The Journey"

Today is the second day of a Smeared and Smudged Forum challenge, Kickstart Your Art!, an Art Journal Every Day challenge.  We are given a prompt every morning and then have 24 hours to produce a journal page.

Today's prompt was to use a song or poem to inspire our page.  I have chosen Mary Oliver's poem, "The Journey," one of my favorite poems.

I didn't have enough room to letter the whole poem, so I am quoting the first and last parts here.

The details:

1. Acrylic paints in the background
2. Tree stamp from this plate by I Brake for Stamps
3. Tree colored with Spectrum Noir alcohol markers
4. Clearsnap Colorbox Chalk Inks
5. Hand-lettered with calligraphy pens

Kickstart Your Art: Day 1

Today is the first day of a Smeared and Smudged Forum challenge, Kickstart Your Art!  This is an art journal challenge where we are given a prompt every morning and then have 24 hours to produce a journal page.

Today's challenge was to "Create Layers."

Here is my entry:

This is something I've been thinking about a lot lately:  Do I want to be healed?  What am I without all my neuroses, fear, and anger?  What does a life without those things look like?  Do I have the courage to embrace that life?

The details:

1.  I started with a ground layer of Gelatos scribbled on the page and then lightly blended with a brush dipped in water.
2. Then I collaged pieces of tissue paper and other papers around the outside of the page, leaving the center clear to show the Gelato coloring.
3. The image was stamped from the Smeared Ink rubber set "Lost Dreams" with permanent ink and colored with Spectrum Noir alcohol markers.
4. I hand-lettered the words in the center and around the outside with permanent Sharpie markers, adding highlights with a white gel pen.  (If you look closely in the close-up, you can see the pencil marks I made laying out the center lettering.  I left them there because I like to see the process and the "hand" of the artist.)
5. Last, I added the fussy-cut figure and gave the whole page a brush with a thin layer of home-made Mod Podge. (Elmer's glue mixed with a little water.)

Thanks for stopping by and I'd love to hear any comments you have!

The Frost King

Today is the January Smeared and Smudged Blog Hop, sponsored by Smeared Ink!  Happy 2015, everyone!

To learn more about Smeared and Smudged, please visit this facebook page, or to learn more about Smeared Ink, visit the shop here.

Today's theme is The Dead of Winter, which I have interpreted thusly:

Please keep hopping through our blog roll (to the right in the sidebar) and take a gander at all the fantastic pieces our members have in store!