Journal Ideas on the Run

The last year has seen a steep increase in my travel time. Which means I fly a lot and stay in a lot of hotels. Traveling can be lonely, and eating out every night is not the luxury it might seem. I don’t have a fat expense account, my diet is pretty rigid, and after a while, the idea of another Cesar salad makes me scowl. But this post is not about traveling, it’s about journal ideas when I’m traveling.

A muted wallpaper with several shades of blue and gray.

Hotels have a practical purpose to their carpets–they have to hide dirt and look trendy. Wallpaper has to be background to art and doorways and bedspreads are vanishing in favor of the bedroom equivalent of a table runner–a piece of fabric placed across the foot of the bed to remind you that there used to be bedspreads.

I photograph the patterns and then copy the idea into my journal. I may use different colors, sometimes I alter the scale, and sometimes I print out the photo and simply transfer it into my journal for color and shape use in a future project.

No matter how tired I am or how reluctant my brain is to write, the colors and patterns of walls, bedcovers, and floors provide endless design interest. Sometimes the design seems to emerge from the way-back machine (when, exactly, did that carpet above debut?).

On the other hand, from a design standpoint, the carpet above is interesting. I like the circles within circles, and the lines in the background gives depth to the whole thing. It was, in fact, the beginning of an idea for a Gelli Plate pattern I worked on. With different colors, it had an updated look.

Sometimes the wallpaper is simply interesting. This one was pleated, but irregularly. I loved the effect, which was limited to the elevator area. A whole hallways of orange and gold would have been too much–this wasn’t Vegas, it was Washington, D.C.

This coverlet detail above reminds me of my favorite “I can’t cut straight lines” solution. The fact that it is not symmetrical makes it even more appealing.

Oranges and earthtones seem to be having their heyday. Again. Which is why I liked this neutral-with-red striped bed covering in Dallas. The rest of the room picked up colors from this palette and made it effective for a small room. Another palette I’m saving for later use. I would not have mixed the pale gray-green into this mix, and the bit of pale apricot really works.

Bold works, too. I wouldn’t want this carpet in my home, but it was the inspiration for a collage I did that wound up in Joan Bess’s book, Gelli Plate Printing. The pattern-within-a-pattern was appealing.

(p. 124 of Joan Bess’s book with my poppy collage, above). Inspiration is just that–an idea that you like, reworked in some other way. Because the poppy-carpet photo-transfer was in my journal, I began to play with the idea of poppies in collage. You never know where it will lead you.

Who would have thought that wallpaper and carpeting would be such an interesting addition to a journal? These walls did talk, after all!

—-Quinn McDonald is a training developer and trainer. She teaches writing all over the U.S. and Canada. She is a certified creativity coach.

 

Monoprinting Experiments

A few weeks ago, I was given two Gelli Arts Plates. My creative life hasn’t been the same since. Gelli Plates are gelatin-like consistency printing surface  that you can use to make gelatin prints without the hassle of making gelatin. I have a big weakness for monoprints. But the monoprints I learned to make are very exacting and precise, and we all know by now, I admire those characteristics–in others. Wabi-sabi and rustic echoes out of my soul.

Gelli plates are used most often in creating backgrounds for multi-media uses. And they are fun to use for that purpose. You put acrylic paint on them then roll out the paint with a brayer. To put designs in the paint, use stencils, homemade tools, or just your fingers. Then put a piece of paper on the paint, smooth the surface with your hands, then pull the print off the plate.

©Quinn McDonald, 2013

Quinadricone Azo Gold and Quin. Burnt Orange are desert colors that blend well with Payne’s Gray and metallic gold. I used a small tile to make the imprint.

© Quinn McDonald, 2013

You can layer the prints, which is super popular in the layer-on-layer art journaling pages. This was fun. But I wanted a little more experimentation. So I made a custom rubber stamp out of foam sheets. That’s a separate tutorial, but it is well worth the time. No carving. You cut out foam and put it on a piece of foam as big as the plate.

© Quinn McDonald, 2013

Here’s a foam stamp, showing both positive and negative use. This is fun. There will be more of this experimenting. But I wanted to make real monoprints. Not for backgrounds, for a print. So I started with a simple one.

© Quinn McDonanld 2013

Three squares, layered, but translucent colors. The middle one is stamped with a gold antique clock. The piece represents past, present and future, each affecting the next. Interesting, but not quite what I wanted–something more graphic and still abstract.

After the Fire, © Quinn McDonald, 2013. Acrylic monoprint.

Much more of what I was trying to get. Landscape feel, contrasting color, and some interesting detail on the lower right corner. (Above) And then I figured out how to draw on the plate and use the accidental arc of Azo Gold. (Below)

Night Pines © Quinn McDonald 2013, acrylic monoprint

I worked the dried monoprint with Pitt Pens to add more detail and to make it look a little more like a woodblock. Then I added Derwent Inktense details to create the final piece. This is what I’d like to do more of. My original intent was to write over it. Now I’m rethinking that, at least for this piece.

And now, it’s the week of Patti Digh’s Design Your Life camp, and I’ll be prepping for that as well as teaching my new Persuasive Writing course. But it was a creatively satisfying weekend.

—Quinn McDonald loves experimenting with monoprints.

Journal Page: Inventing an Alphabet

OK, I’m a writer, so I like different alphabets and codes. They also make great additions to a journal page. A new alphabet, a code–it’s a clever journaling piece that adds an easy design element through writing.

Could be someone cheering.

This morning on my walk, I saw interesting writing on the street. My mind went to an interesting story line–what if visitors from another planet came down and took notes on the street on what they saw and learned? What I saw on the street would be a kind of alien journal, written in code. That idea appealed to me, and I took some photos of the “writing.”

Looks like it could be a back-to-back letter.

That idea led to another one: why just use the regular alphabet in your journal? Why not add some new ones? New letter shapes, new designs are all around you. You can use alchemy symbols,  the Greek alphabet, numerical symbols.

A really interesting one is the Mormon Deseret alphabet (below). When you use shapes from an alphabet, you can invent what they mean to you–what the letter shapes are going to mean in your world. You can translate interesting letters into whole words if you like.

My favorite of the street was the one below–this is definitely the answer to the meaning of life, the universe, and everything:

I made a journal page with a new alphabet. First I collaged various shades of white and cream on the page, then I used a brush and wrote quickly, without hesitation, inventing as I went along. And here is what the journal page looks like with a new alphabet:

And if you want to check out a few more different alphabets, this page should get you started.

—Quinn McDonald is a writer, and artist who makes things up as she goes along.

Saturday Creative Roll

Giveaway: The three people who won Dina’s book from the March 27 blog post are Shannon Ganshorn, Annettte Geistfeld, and Ann M. Philli. Congratulations to all of you!

Julie Fei-Fan Balzer is a multi-talented multi-media artist. I love her lettering and the design of her journal pages. I never draw faces–not in my journal, not in anything. So it’s time I gave you a link to someone who does.  Sharon Evans is doing a guest post about faces. The whole idea is interesting, 29 days of face drawing, on Ayala’s blog post. Whew, three amazing artists in one paragraph.  A good beginning, for sure.

Joanne Sharpe is a Journal Artist and knows how to produce a huge variety of lettering. Here’s some eye candy of Joanne’s lettering on Pinterest. And here is Joanne’s blog.

Donna Downey fills journal pages with bright, easy colors. Her busy website has a great inspirational blog and video to enjoy.

Pocket magnifier as art, the joy of an MP3 player

One of my favorite art journaling blogs is John a-Lookin’ Around. John P. is an engineer who lives in Kansas, and he doesn’t post as often as he used to, but the archives are just sitting there, waiting to be drooled over. I love his elegantly simple page design.

Have a great creative Saturday!

—Quinn McDonald just got a delivery from JetPens. She also has to do her taxes. This is harder than she thought.

Journal Pages Unbound

Today, I was working on free-standing journal pages. I love the idea of combining fabric and drawing. A drawing of a cactus with a sheer fabric seemed intriguing.

Fabric journal pages open up a whole new genre of writing and drawing in your art journal. I’m creating free-standing or unbound pages–experimenting with creating unsequenced book pages. So far, I’m liking it a lot.

Yellow, orange and red polyester fabric.

My idea was to use fabric as a background. The way it turns out, it’s sewn on as a foreground and takes just a bit of planning.

The fabric is a sheer polyester in yellow, orange and red. I thought of sunsets and desert evenings when I purchased it. The woman behind the cutting counter looked at the sheer, bright fabric and at my request for a quarter yard and asked, politely but with great wariness, what I might be making with this. I’m sure she was terrified at what piece of clothing I might have in mind. “Art project,” I smiled. She broke into a big, relieved smile and then said, “It’s so much fun to play crafty games with the grandchildren for Easter isn’t it?” I smiled back. No sense to disturb her fantasy of happy Easter projects.

Layers, top to bottom: fabric, fusible webbing, watercolor paper. Cover with parchment before ironing.

First I drew a cactus on a piece of Strathmore pre-cut, cold-press watercolor paper. I added a scrap of landscape to anchor the image and explain the sunset colors. To give the cactus and landscape colors, I used Derwent Inktense and Caran D’Ache watercolor pencils.

Next, I cut a piece of lightweight fusible webbing the size of the page, and a piece of the fabric just a bit bigger. I covered the entire work with a piece of cooking parchment, to prevent the iron from sticking to the melted webbing.

Edges finished with zig zag stitching.

After ironing the fabric to the postcard, I trimmed the fabric and using a sewing machine set on zig-zag, finished the edges of the page.

By placing the fabric carefully, you can create different lighting effects.

Different lighting effects using different areas of the fabric.

The back of the page is for writing. I don’t show those parts here because the writing is personal. Eventually, I’ll do some samples and show those, too.

—Quinn McDonald is the author of Raw Art Journaling. She will teach these techniques in a class called Postcards from the Other Side of Your Brain at Valley Ridge Art Center on May 5-6, 2012. There are still places left if you’d like to join.

Tutorial: Strip Weaving Paper

Weaving paper strips makes a great trim on a page,  an elegant edge or letterhead-type top, or even a page itself. You probably learned to weave paper in kindergarten, and you probably learned the hard way–holding down vertical   strips with one hand while chanting “over, under, over, under” with a strip you pushed in horizontally (landscape orientation), while trying to keep everything lined up. There is a much easier way.

First step: tape all strips down to desk.

1. Let’s say you are going to weave a piece seven strips of paper wide. It’s best to use an uneven number for the strips you set up to weave through. In the illustration there are seven strips. Place the strips on your desk so the tops are even. Tape the tops of the strips to the desk using a removable masking tape. Make sure the strips are spaced evenly.

2. With your non-dominant hand, pick up the bottom of strips 1, 3, 5, 7 and hold them just off the desk. You can use a small ruler or strip of index card if you like to hold them up if you used very wide strips.  Your hand is fine, too.

3. Using your dominant hand, pick up one of the strips you are weaving with. Slip it under the lifted bottom of the strips, keeping it over the remaining strips (2, 4, 6). Slide the strip to the top, close to the tape.

Snug the woven strip so it is straight.

4. Lift strips 2, 4, 6 with one hand and slide a weaving strip from the bottom to the top, keeping it over strips 1, 3, 5, 7.  Continue this until the weaving is complete.

5. Leave the tape in place. Using glue on a thin brush, pick up the papers on the edge–only the ones on top of a strip of paper, and put a glue dot on the strip it is on. Glue only the top strips on the right and left side. When the glue is dry, remove the tape, turn over the paper, and glue this side as you did the other.

Do not glue the top and bottom, the weaving needs flexibility to work as a kinetic piece. That also means you won’t get good results if you glue it across the gutter in your journal–the page shifts and is bigger when the book is open and smaller when closed. The piece will eventually tear is you glue it across the

Weave from the bottom, lifting alternate strips.

gutter.

Alternatives: Use one color for the long strips and another for the cross-weaving strips.

Your strips don’t have to be straight. They can be wavy or wiggly, as long as the overall shape is not sharply curved.

White strips make a lovely texture. Glue the weaving down on one page of the journal, cover with a thin coat of ivory paint. Dry. Write over the whole thing.

Weave the piece using white strips, then mark areas you want to color. Dissassemble, color, re-assemble.

Weave loosely, remove the tape, pull the corners to create a diagonal weave. Glue to keep the shape.

–Quinn McDonaldis an art instigator.  She wants people to play with art and stumble across meaningful results. That’s what her book, Raw Art Journaling encourages.

Weaving glued to right side, unglued on left.

Journal Page: Pear

Before I’ve unpacked my bag to teach journaling, the participants say, “I never know what to write in my journal. I’d like to keep a journal, but it would be blank. I don’t know what to say.” Let’s start with something easy. Here’s a recipe clipped from the newspaper. (A cultural artifact dating from the 17th to the early 21st century, printed on cheap paper and containing a condensed version of news, advertising and comics and angry letters to the editor delivered to your door for a reasonable price every day.)

Keep special or often-used recipes in your journal.

It’s Maya Angelou’s recipe for poached pears and is blissfully delicious. My recipe box is full. If I put this recipe on an index card and stick it in a recipe book, I’ll wind up paging through all 400 cookbooks looking for it. Yes, we have 400 cookbooks.

So I turned it into a journal page. I drew some brightly colored pears, so I can find the recipe when I flip through the journal, and left space for notes, ideas of recipes to serve it with, or notes of who shared this dish at my dinner table.

A journal is the GPS of your journey. Eat well along the way.

—Quinn McDonald is a raw-art journaler. Her book, Raw Art Journaling: Making Meaning, Making Art, comes out in July, 2011, published by North Light Books.

Product Review: Liquid Pencil

Reductive drawing, graphite on paper, imaged made with eraser. © QuinnCreative, 2008

Maybe you have a journal that looks like a picture book; mine doesn’t. OK, I’ve made a few for classes that are all tidy, but my real journals are about my life–and that means messy pages where I try things out, take notes, demo products.

Powdered graphite has been around forever, it’s messy but wonderful. My favorite work with these is to do reductive drawings–you start by dusting the powder over paper, then draw by using an eraser to remove the graphite. Remove too much and you sprinkle on some more. I drew the dove in flight, above, using that technique.

Now there is a liquid graphite, called Liquid Pencil, made by Derivan. Less messy, but it has its own control issues. It comes in a small jar and goes on with a paintbrush. It comes in six colors, each in a choice of permanent or rewettable. I purchased Grey 3 in rewettable and Sepia in permanent.

Liquid pencil is great for backgrounds and painting in subtle shades.

You can see the different effects in the sample page. Grey is on top, and the three streaks are made with an eraser after the liquid pencil has dried. Sepia is on the bottom, and it was much harder to get the eraser to pick up any of the permanent kind.

Out of the jar, it is quite thick. It can be thinned with water or acrylic medium. Using medium makes it permanent, so you can buy the rewettable and make it permanent yourself.Because the shading goes from dark to light, you can also use liqud pencil to paint or write with a brush, and create shadings of great subtlety.

The rewettable stays down nicely. After it dried, I rubbed my fingers over it and very little picked up. About as much as powdered graphite with one light coating of fixative.

In the Phoenix area, Derivan liquid pencil is carried at Jerry’s Artarama in Tempe. On May 3 they will switch to summer hours, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., so check the website before you go.

If you look at the journal page, above, right,  you’ll see a line of pencil writing with a wash of turquoise blue behind it. This fun pencil is worth owning. It’s called NoBlot 705, Bottle of Ink in a Pencil. It combines a smooth graphite with aniline dye, so it writes in a non-fading, tough-to-erase black, like a pencil, but if you wet it with a brush, it dissolves into a beautiful turquoise permanent ink. If you are old enough, you may remember the grocer or bank clerk, licking a pencil and writing in a ledger. He (it was rarely a she) licked the pencil to activate the aniline ink, and make the ledger permanent.

The pencils are discontinued. Sanford is offering a permanent pencil, but it won’t have the cool turquoise dye in it. You can get it in Phoenix at Arizona Art Supply in Tempe. There are several others in the area, but not all of them have the NoBlot705.

Keep color samples of pens, pencils, inks in your journal. It shows how the product looks on your journal pages.

I’m working on some new ideas, using Gelly Roll gel pens. I’m not much of a glitter-lover, but gel pens have some interesting uses. (I’ll share more when I have decent samples).  Each pen carries a tiny color code. Because neither the cap nor the ink-filled barrel show the real color, I create rectangles in my journal, and write the pen ID number in the rectangle. The image on the left doesn’t show the amazing amount of glittery goodness in the pen, so don’t judge by the scan. I put color samples in all my journals to see how pens or pencils work in the specific journal I’m using.

You are now armed with enough new products to create at least a week’s worth of journal pages–have a wonderful time trying them out!

—Quinn McDonald is a writer and journal artist. She is writing a book for art journalers who don’t know how to draw but want to keep a meaningful journal. The book, Raw Art Journaling: Making Meaning, Making Art will be released by North Light Books in June of 2011.

To-Don’t List

Join by adding your own to-don't list items.

We all have to-do lists. Just for today, I’m creating a To-Don’t list. Things I can let go of, not care about, not do. Ahhh, it feels better already.

To-Don’t

—Spend all day doing laundry instead of enjoying last of the cool, sunshiny weather.

—Dust all the blinds after the last few days of wind and pollen.

—Drop by other people’s blogs, leaving my website and blogsite so I can get their readers over to my site.

—Answer that angry email with an angrier email. That’ll show ’em. Make ’em feel sorry, too.

—Tell my best friend what she should have done in that confrontation with her boss; advise (unasked) my spouse how to look better for that first meeting at work; fix my client’s need for attention.

—Find other people’s mistakes and point them out, along with my expertise in these matters. Maybe snag a few clients by showing off what I know. Really put myself out there.

—Start six new projects, but with no idea why or what they are supposed to be.

That’s my to-don’t list for today–things I want to walk away from and not get involved with. What’s on your To-Don’t list? Leave a comment.

Page from a Raw-Art Journal

One of my favorite quotes is from Dogen, about enlightenment being like the moon reflected in water. The moon and sky can be reflected in a tiny drop of water and hold the whole reflection, without getting the moon wet and without disturbing the reflection.
If I were a calligrapher, I would spend hours playing with this quote.
But I’m not a calligrapher, so I created several pages in my journal of how I see and feel the quote.
That’s the joy of a raw-art journal–you don’t have to be an illustrator. You simply let the quote move onto the page in its own way.

In the first page, the words are important, and the image adds movement, although it doesn’t illustrate what the words say. Nor does it need to. The curvature of the path of the moon and the increasing size stir memories of seeing big pale moons rise into the sky on a fragile spring night.
In the next one, the quote is not used at all, only the words “enlightenment” and “satori” (Japanese for ‘englightenment’) are used. One is bold and graphic, the other is a reflection of enlightenment in it’s absence of form. It shows the power of the quote, without ever referring to it specifically.

A raw-art journal can let you explore your intellect and emotions without entangling either one.

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–Images: journal pages by Quinn McDonald. (c) 2008-9 All rights reserved. Quinn McDonald is a certified creativity coach and writer. She teaches workshops on raw-art journal writing. For more information, see her website, raw-art-journals.com