A few weeks ago I signed up for a neat class -
Artful Pages, 4 Artists 4 Ways - which started yesterday. Four journaling artists with different styles of work got together and offered a class consisting of 3 lessons per week from each person.
I'm using a small journal, about 5" x 7", so my spreads are 9" wide by not quite 7" tall. A good size for me, not too big nor too small, and I'm gluing together every two pages to give each spread some heft. I'll be using images of my mother and her mother, scanned and printed in various sizes and with occasional Photoshop treatments. (one note about gluing pages together - I had a terrible time with this in a previous attempt - wrinkles all over the place, warping, etc. Since then I bought a rubber
brayer and brayer the hell out of stuff after I glue it down. Works great.)
First up is Mary of
Green Paper and her glue books. The concept couldn't be simpler - glue and paper. But you still must consider layout, balance of components, color scheme, etc, so she covered the basics in the first lesson and off I went.
In considering how I wanted to handle 4 different types of journaling, I decided to do one glue page spread, then leave spreads for the next 3 teachers, then do another glue page, etc, throughout the journal, so that I'll have a mix of styles all the way thru. I'm also going to mix the teachers on any given page, so that I'll be doing some writing on some of the glue book pages, for example, so that this will end up being a mixed media journal from beginning to end.
For the first one, I used a black and white background, which ended up being sort of a harsh choice, so I covered most of it with other elements. Now I actually like the softer images against the graphic b/w. Some of the papers are from classes Mary's given in the past, so they'll look familiar to some people. This page is mostly greens of various hues. Even the old notebook page on the left is greenish in real life. I'll be writing on it during Hope's week of the class. The image is my maternal grandmother Teresa, dead at 36 from breast cancer.
The second spread is my mother at about a year old. She's sitting in an ornately carved chair with her goofy bowl haircut and her pudgy little legs sticking straight out. I used an old piece of sheet music for the background. I scored a good pile of it during a visit to San Diego in January. I framed the photo with a couple different sheets of fancy paper and filled in here and there with various items from the rest of the sheet music. 'The Little Damozel' was the name of the music and it fit a little girl, so I used it, plus a couple other bits. This spread is quite heavy on the right, but I'll do some painting or something later, maybe during Lenna's week of class, to balance it out.
All in all, I'm pleased with my work from the first class. Now if I can just keep up cause the next class posts on Wednesday, then Friday, and then the following Sunday the next teacher starts, etc.
The address book page is the real McCoy, from Theresa's little leather booklet. I just grabbed a page randomly, turned out to be the Rs. The fine fountain pen script is so appealing, all the more so because my own handwriting is so poor. It was just lost on the book page, color-wise, so I matted it, per Mary's technique, on part of a wine label we collected in Napa years ago. Just the right green to give it some weight.
The green car is obviously a new piece, and too white around the edges, so I colored it first by wiping some blending chalk over it.
