Posts Tagged ‘Art Journal Caravan 2010’

I am not the slightest bit musically inclined. I wish I was. Music can get my creative juices flowing, not really that it gives me ideas, more that it just puts me in the right frame of mind to be creative. I was wondering, does art do the same thing for musicians? I have a friend who is a musician, I might see if I can get her over here to comment.

This week the part of the journal prompt at the Art Caravan that inspired me was, “What music really inspires you? What gets your toes tapping involuntarily? How can listening to music while you art journal influence your work? How can music change your mood?” To tell you the truth music has not been a huge part of my “down-time” since I’ve been married. So, thinking about what music inspired me took me backwards in time.

The first person that came to mind was Lyle Lovett. He and Sheryl Crow are probably two of my all time favorite musicians. I guess I love folksy, bluesy, alternative country music with a bit of gospel thrown in. Lyle Lovett is really a category of his own in my opinion! I saw him on the “Big Band” tour at the Majestic Theater in San Antonio, I think the year before he married Julia Roberts. I was on the 2nd row center aisle and it blew me away.

His “Church” song brings a smile to my face, it hits the climax around 3 minutes and 15 seconds. It reminds me of growing up in the Baptist church. I remember many a sermon where I was hungry. But, momma was not home cooking dinner, she was at church. And, cooking didn’t start till we got home, which meant even longer before the stomach would stop growling. So, pot roasts on Sunday were common at our house, they could be cooking while we were at church.

Anyway, the reason I like Lyle is that the humor and sarcasm in his songs make me smile inside. And, it seems that he stays grounded in his Faith despite the twisted turns life brings his way. That is what made me relate to him way back then. So, when he married Julia Roberts and the world was stunned I wasn’t, I got it. He sang to her soul and made her laugh. It made me sad that they didn’t make it. I hope all of the “Beauty and the Beast” tabloid stuff was not responsible. According to the oh so reliable press, they are “still friends.” That picture was their wedding day, don’t they look happy?!

Credits: Church photo is mine. Photos of Lyle and Julia are borrowed from the Internet. Lyrics from “Church”, “She’s Already Made Up Her Mind” and “She Makes Me Feel Good.” Several element’s from Bisontine’s Song of Love kit. An altered abused film border from CRenee. Music alpha from As You Wish Designs. Swirl from Rhonna Farrar. Papers from Blyth Evans.

The art journal word prompt this week is bliss. The first thing that came to mind was ignorance is bliss, but I think “Innocence is Bliss” would be kinder and more accurate for children. So, that is the underlying theme, but the photo painting is hopefully making you think of a cool breeze warmed with sunshine on a fresh spring day.

I’ve done a scrapbook layout with other photos taken on this day. It was taken on the first day of spring in 2009 at a graveyard. The building is sort of an old gatehouse made with rough stonework and it has an amazing red wood door. You can see the door from the road on the way to my husband’s work. It was calling my name every time I drove by…so one day I took the girls on a photo shoot. I told them it was castle ruins. It just added to the magic of spring.

I decided to take my husband’s recent advice to a friend and “not pull a Gilligan.” I asked him what in the world he meant and his answer made me laugh out loud. He said Gilligan and team never tried the same thing twice. If a boat didn’t work then the next time they’d try a plane. That they had a bunch of great ideas, but they never stuck with any idea long enough to perfect it.

So, I decided to keep working on my digital painting technique, using my own photography as the canvas.

This time I started with a wonderful freebie glass plate negative. I used a few variations actually, stamping them in different shades of cream/tan/brown.

I drew an outline around the girls, tree, door and some bricks in a brown color. Then I clipped the picture to a glass plate negative, merged the two layers and used it as my “paint”. I made a new layer under that layer and “painted” the majority of my “painting” using a bunch of free brushes from the BitBox site (thanks to someone in the Caravan forum for posting about them.) And, added the distressed scrolls from BitBox on a layer above the “painting.”

Then I used Kim DeSmet’s bright grunge papers as paint over the photo layer. I painted highlights with a yellow paper and used a pink paper for a nice color cast and slight texture. This helped it look more like a painting and less like a photo.

I used the cloning tool with the original photo as reference to paint in shadows on the dresses. And Kim’s pink paper helped make their faces more painterly.

Finally I started adding some bling and dimension with elements from New Life Dreams and Jofia Devoe. In the end I decided to stylize it just a tad more by making my “drawing” and text have a bit of bling, using Microferk’s glitter styles.

Here is the original photo for reference.

The Art Journal Caravan verb this week was “simplify” and you were supposed to journal about yourself. While this doesn’t look like it is about me, in a round about way it is. My mom and stepdad square dance. I’m thrilled that they have such an active social life. A few years ago they tried to recruit us to join and learn. It was sweet…but so not anything remotely of interest to us.

Anyway, one evening Neal was otherwise occupied and, I decided on the spur of the moment to take the girls by a dance. I just love that recreational center, it is a huge room with gorgeous old wood floors and “church-style” benches all the way around the room. So quaint. In fact, we had our rehearsal dinner there. It was simple and laid back. We had red checkered table cloths and catered barbecue. My MIL picked sunflowers that morning and put them in old tin pails. It was completely understated and we loved it.

This was the first time I’d been there for a dance. It was really sweet watching all the couples have a ball dancing. And even sweeter letting Granny show off her grand-babies.

In this photo Danielle is joining her Granny for a line dance. She had recently seen the Hannah Montana movie, so she totally thought it was COOL! She wants her granny to make her a big fat skirt so she can go dancing again. I love it that *she* thinks it is cool!

And, I want to make it a point to take her back…it is just always after bedtime…such an effort to get there…but such simple pleasure once you are there.

Here is the photo I used to “paint” with:

Here is a photo of the girls dancing on a break:

For the journal page I scanned in a page from a very old songbook. Next I used my Wacom pen to trace an outline of the ladies in the photograph. I tried to be slightly more precise on my main subjects and purposely jagged on the background dancers. I then brushed with a slightly translucent wet black brush roughly behind the people in the collage. That layer was clipped to an off-white painterly brush stroke by Dianne Rigdon. It helped tone down the music in that part of the collage, I was going for a “wash” effect. Then I “painted” with slightly translucent wet black again on another layer, this time staying inside the lines of the people. I wanted the colors from the photograph to show through so I clipped that layer to the photograph. I love how the reflections of the dancers show on the wood floor.

The alphabet is a music sheet alpha by Blythe Evans. “Simple” is blended as a linear burn and on “Pleasures” I deleted the base layer of music to let a pink paper show through with the blending options.

I hope this is a reminder to me to force myself to do stuff even when I really don’t *feel* like it!

One of the prompts this week was to use the word “mend”. Rather than use the quote provided this week, I went with a bible verse.

I was thinking about the hard work you do in relationships. Tearing down barriers to communication, and mending hurt feelings, etc.

This is the design I did in Photoshop using mostly graphics from Tracy Ann. The notebook paper leaf is from Tangie Baxter’s Art Journal Caravan steamer trunk. I figured if I ever wanted to journal on this I’d write on that cute notebook leaf. I believe the bird house is from NLD and I filled the heart with some ephemera from Tangie’s trunk. If anyone needs to know about the other items I’ll have to go hunting because my computer crashed before I got to the step of recording the kit names.

And here is the art journal page after the hybrid touches. I used the Copic colored Multiliners, Liquid Pearls for dimension, Spica glitter pens, Copic markers/Prismacolor pencils for shading, and Tim Holtz red distress ink for the edges.