Category Archives: art journal

Tangled art journal pages.

It has been a while since I last did anything in the way of art so just to get my little grey cells thinking creatively again I got out an old art journal, that I hadn’t filled, and randomly put down some colour for the background across 2 pages.  Next, I doodled about with some black lines and filled some areas in.  It was way too black so I brightened it up with white dots and just had a play.  It isn’t quite zentangle but it was fun to do and a good way to get me back into doing some art.

2 art journal pages with black lines, black filled in circles and white dots, on a background of magenta and turquoise toned down with white wash
Tangle journal pages

Neurographic art

The last few months I have been concentrating on the garden and keeping it alive during the hot weather.  Lately we have been having the conservatory fixed so all the plants that lived there had to be kept on every available table in the house so I didn’t have access to any table.  I finally got my table back and had a go at some neurographic art.  There are quite a few you tube videos https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NtKSOUV7U8U   that show you how to do it and although there is an actual therapeutic method,  I just did it for fun.

watercolour and pen painting with interlacing circles and rounded joinsThis is the painting,  and I took a photo of it and shrunk it to make a greetings card with a black border.  The card is white but as my scanner wasn’t working I had to use my phone camera to photograph it and the card wouldn’t sit flat so I just cropped the white of the card out.

Teasel watercolour

My goodness how did it get to 2018 so quickly!  My mojo went for a wander so I just had a wee break from anything arty/crafty for a while but I am back now to have another go.  So I am starting the year off by doing small sketches or other in my sketch books or art journals rather than trying to paint ‘proper’ pictures so that I don’t mind too much if I muck up.  I did this the other day having watched Alison C Board’s video on you tube painting teasel on wood.  My version is not on wood and doesn’t use the same colours but it gave me inspiration to have a go.  Watercolour and Brusho but with a bit of Stabilo pen to darken a few lines.

Sketchbook Project 2014 Organised Chaos (page 13) Circles

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So here is my last double page and it is where I have put my contents.  The contents are in circles and little circles join them all like a chain.  Think of cycles and life cycles, some planetary orbits, mushroom rings, ripples from a single rain drop, flower heads, rock formations craters, and many more.  Chains of events one leading to another and some branching off.  This was mostly acrylic paint and computer generated text.

That was my last page of my little book.  I hope you have enjoyed it and I hope it stands up to it’s tour with the Sketchbook project.

Sketchbook Project 2014 Organised Chaos (page 10) Fractals

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Of all the beautiful fractal (self – similar) patterns that are out there I chose to do rather a plain page to depict them.  I couldn’t make up my mind if I wanted to draw trees or feathers or rivers or ferns or nerves or mycelium or a thunder bolt or crystals or snowflakes or alveoli or blood vessels or……. …..So I made my trees look a bit like feathers which looked a bit like furrows on a hillside with mountains in the background and I added some ferns and angelica type plants.  This page was done using watercolour pencils and a black Pitt pen.

Sketchbook Project 2014 Organised Chaos (page 8) Annelids

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I just love doing this kind of doodle!  I was thinking about the fact that earthworms take the dead leaves and make lovely rich compost from them – just another one of natures recyclers.  If it wasn’t for nature’s recyclers what would our Earth look like today I wonder?  I had gesso-ed the page first but forgot that my water soluble graphite pencils would not blend they way I had wanted them to on that sealed surface so I changed to ordinary graphite pencils and blended them with a paper stump instead   Also used a copic multi liner pen and a pink pencil.

Sketchbook Project 2014 Organised Chaos (page 7) Dendrites

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I didn’t plan to do this page really, but instead, I was going to do one large dendrite with lots of branches off.  I was playing around with my inks and compressed air and decided to do lots of interconnections like those in the brain (hence the grey background).  I did think that if I just tried to go vertical and horizontal only then it would not look as messy as if I had blown the ink in all directions. Everything is interconnected in some way or other.