QOTD – 10.27.16

I’m leaving you with two quotes today. I’ve been getting back into art with a vengeance lately. I just miss being creative and doing art stuff and I know I don’t do enough of it. I’ve really enjoyed going back and experimenting and being inspired by other people who are much much better than me. I feel like I’m trying to rush into all these different mediums like watercolours, and Tombows, and gaouche, and so on and so forth cause I see all these examples and inspiration and then I don’t like it cause I think I’m doing everything wrong and it doesn’t look as pretty as it did in my head or as pretty as what other people are doing and then I get discouraged and forgetting that I need to take the time to experiment and let my creative take time to explore.

So I guess if you’re going what I’m going through, this is a reminder for you too to not be discouraged, to not be afraid that you’re wrong, and to remember why you’re doing art in teh first place – which is to have fun and to create!

Art Supplies Mini-Haul

There is nothing I love more than going into an art store and being allowed to go a little nuts in there. Which is basically what I did today at Michael’s. It started with my just needing a few things: tracing paper, mixed media paper, a new sketchbook. Then it all went down hill from there as it so often does.

Here is my haul – or the fun stuff anyway:

Look at my new sketchbook!! Isn’t it just gorgeous? I usually like the black spiral bound sketchbooks, but I saw this and it was just so beautiful plus it was on sale and much cheaper than my usual sketchbooks. Except now I don’t want to do anything in here because it’s so beautiful

I also wanted to play around with some new markers for my bullet journal and decided to pick up a pack of this. I love that it has such a large variety of colours and it doesn’t bleed through my moleskin! Yay!

As you can see, they’re dual tipped which are always super handy and there is virtually no shadow at all, which is so perfect. Some of my other markers were bleeding through. I am very excited to introduce these to my bullet journal.

I also got a basic set of the Faber Castell PITT Artist Pens. I love how well they wrote and how it made the fading gradient on its own. I didn’t have to do anything. But I love the look and feel of them as I wrote with them.

The final marker set of markers I got was the Artist’s Loft Watercolour Dual Tip Markers. I tried to play around with it using my brand new watercolour pen and with the Tombow Blender Pen. The Artist’s Loft did not blend very well as you can see. It was pretty disappointing, so these ones I will be returning. I was, however, pleasantly surprised with how well the Tombows worked with the watercolour pen. It worked even better than with the blending pen. 

The other thing I got that I was really excited about were the gelatos. I’ve heard so many things about them and seen so many projects and I had been meaning to get a pack to play with. These are the Faber Castell metallic gelatos. I was so excited to play with these, except I didn’t really know how!! So a quick search said I could blend with my fingers, as you can see in the blue. It is supposedly better if I use gesso on the page first, so I’ll need to pick some up. The other way to use it is like watercolour, which I did with the green and then I tried to mix the purple and the gold together. You can also stamp with them, but I don’t have any stamps, so I’ll save that for a different day. They are so pretty and so easy to work with, I can’t wait to further explore and play with these some more!

The other things I got were a few Copic markers and self hardening clay to play with, so I can’t wait to break those out. I have to learn how to use those Copic markers first! But I have a few things that I have in mind, so I’ll see  how that goes.

It was a very productive shopping spree and I am so excited to play with everything and to start creating!

QOTD – 09.19.16

I finally set up my office/art room and I’ve been making use of the chalkboard. I am not great at it, but Pinterest is my bff right now while I practice and stuff.

Hope everyone has a great week!

QOTD – 01.27.16

 

Artful Weekend

This weekend has been great for me creativity wise. I got to do a lot of painting  – a project I wanted to work on for the bff’s baby’s upcoming birthday. And I got to do a little more playing around on the watercolours.

Saturday, I basically stayed at home just painting the entire day away. The bff and her husband were trying to do more fun things for baby’s room. They wanted to add some colour to the room since up until this point, they decorated the room for themselves, not for baby. I thought that as part of baby’s birthday present, I would do some fun bright coloured paintings for them.
I found some ideas from Pinterest (thank you Pinterest)!

These were my final results. I hope the bff and her husband likes them !!

The watercolours are still experimental right now. I just like watching the brush strokes and seeing how the colours blend so easily and how they look building different layers on top of one another. I did go buy a cheap but better set at Michael’s since the Dollar Store one felt really chalky and powdery after it dried. To the right is a project I’ve been working on for another friend’s son – a Harry Potter ABC book. Thought that this would be a good time to practice on my watercolours since it’s also such a forgiving medium and another reason why I wanted a slightly better set than my Dollar Store one!

I messed up on Dumbledore’s nose though on this. I was going to re-do it, but I didn’t want to go crazy perfectionist on it either as I can be prone to doing sometimes. I’ll see how I feel about it in a few days. I also wanted to do something more fun with the alphabet, but since it’s for a kid to learn his alphabets, I stuck with very simple block letters.

I’m having a lot of fun creating this book and adding little things in it that would amuse my friend who is a huge Potterhead as well (Like using Dumbledore’s full name!), but I am having the worst time deciding which Harry Potter thing to go with each letter! I mean, do I go with H is for Hedwig (because poor Hedwig!!), or for Harry Potter (since the series is about him after all?), or for Hogwarts (it’s his home!). I have had to argue with myself with a lot of them! Will continue to share as I go along!

Let me know if you guys have any suggestions for the book 🙂

A Little Bit of Watercolour

I’ve been meaning to explore watercolour. I never got to in high school and throughout the years, I keep thinking I should really get into it. I keep seeing these gorgeous watercolour paintings and wish that I could do the same, but I’ve never found the time to really explore it. I have these nice sets of watercolour paints waiting to be used. I buy them thinking, NOW I’ll have to learn how to use them. I bring them out and look at them and then realize that I can’t use them! I have no idea what I’m doing and the last thing that I want is to waste my good stuff on practice.

Today I was at the Dollar Store and they had a few sets in the art section, so I thought, well, I might as well start here! So I bought the cheap ones and started playing around with different brushes and different methods.

I picked three brushes and just started making broad strokes across the page, played around with just smooshing the paint brushes to see what would happen. I tried to do some splattering. Note to self for next time: cover the area I’m working on so I don’t get paint all over my work area!

I didn’t paint any masterpieces, but it was a fun day getting to explore. I’ll have to look up some tutorials online and practice some more!

 

Aeonian

Journal52’s prompt for the first week of the year was to pick a strange word that resonated with me.

In the extensive list provided, I chose the word Aeonian: continuing forever; eternal.

Lately, I have been obsessed with polka dots. Which fit in perfectly for my theme because circles never end, they go on forever and ever. The three large circles represents the three big loves of my life: my daddy, my bff, and my three cats.

A Little Art

Ending my first day of 2016 with a little bit of art. I was going to do something more productive but then I was like, it’s New Years day! Part of what I want to do this year is to get back into art. Plus I have an entire blank bullet journal with pages and pages waiting to be filled! I am, unfortunately, so hopelessly blank creatively that I spent most of the day researching art journal prompts and I found a few that I think will help me get my creativity flowing again.

Today’s prompt was from Tumblr that I forgot to save and it was something like to choose a lyric and bring it to life. The lyric that has been stuck in my head lately is from Nick Carter’s new album, so obviously that was the one that I choose to visualize.

 

don’t let your heart bleed out, just let the sunlight in

It was so therapeutic. I cannot wait to get back into art and creativity for this year. I have tried to do these weekly prompts before and fallen off after the first month or so. I am so determined to do this this year.

I will need to find a better way to photograph my work though or better lighting. The phone camera is not the greatest camera in the world for taking pictures of my art work it seems