Working on it . . .

Well, it is a bit embarrassing, but I am going to make public my artistic attempts over the last week.

I really liked the journal page idea in that video I posted, so I started out with that. I used an old book that Rob and I had put out for recycling to tear up pages of text, and just arranged them willy-nilly. The paints she used have really intense colors, and I enjoyed playing around with them.

It's an interesting technique to give the background a bit more depth. After that, I tried out several different pens, to see if I could write or color on top of the paint. It did work, although the surface remained just a bit sticky. I like the look of the black ink with the colors, but I might try to do them in the other order on another page, to see if that works. I'm really more of a pencil-sketch kind of person (editing with an eraser is such a nice feature), and my pen sketches are not outstanding. But I figure this page is really more about seeing how things work. I didn't get the paint on nearly smooth enough either.

I'm going to continue to add things to this page, using different techniques, to see what works.

I also created a little felted picture. Really I just started randomly felting, but eventually it had kind of the look of a landscape, so I moved it in that direction. I used beads to add some details. Felting is interesting --you can leave areas puffy, you can twist the wool to give it a different effect, and you can blend colors. It's also super easy, so it's a bit like painting with the wool.

It's actually kind of terrible looking, really, but it did give me a good feel for how this can work :-)

So, now that I've shared these, everyone can feel perfectly comfortable sharing any of their artistic attempts :-)