In this episode of the Paper Doll Chronicles is all about how to alter a hardback book and turn it into a handmade journal to hold your paper dolls.
We recently moved our Dad out of his house of 30 years and found many treasures including some old black and white knitting magazines that belonged to my grandmother.
I will be using these images in an altered book over the next few weeks.
I want to hold onto these images and create something to remember my grandmother.
Summer feels like a wonderful time to play and dip into themes of nostalgia and memories of our past.
You might choose to do this with old photos or found magazine images - use what you have on hand.
*Suggested supplies*
- A used hardback book
- Glue stick
- Matte medium
- Gesso
- Acrylic paint
- Magazine images or old photos
- Brushes, water, paper towels
- Craft dryer
- Stencils, stamps and other mark making tools
- A collection of words cut from magazines
Transcript
00:01 good morning my creative friends and welcome to Painting in Your PJs with
00:06 Minette i'm Dr minette Riordan i am in my favorite summer pajamas this morning
00:12 and I'm super excited to dive into our June project which is going to be about
00:18 how to alter um a an old hardback book into a journal
00:25 that's going to house some images that I found when I was cleaning out my
00:31 father's house last fall and I've been holding on to them for a special project
00:36 and if you're brand new to Painting in Your PJs welcome this year we're in a
00:42 longer series called the Paper Doll Chronicles where I am just in love with
00:47 paper dolls and having a blast creating all different kinds of paper dolls last month we worked in felt
00:55 which was also a really fun experiment i was surprised how much I enjoyed actually stitching the felt and this
01:03 month I really wanted to get back to my love of art journaling and see how could I marry my love of art journaling with
01:11 this fun passion for peeper dolls everything we do here on Painting in
01:17 Your PJs is about how to use art as a tool for self-exploration self-discovery
01:24 and personal growth so everything I do I want it to be beautiful but I also want it to be meaningful and to tell a story
01:32 and this month it's going to take a little bit different direction that I'm really kind of excited about so let me
01:38 switch my camera over and we're going to dive right in and it's been a really
01:44 long time since I have done this kind of altered book project but last fall we
01:50 were moving my dad from his home in
01:56 Texas to live near my brother in Santa Barbara California and we found these
02:02 old metal file boxes that we thought were going to be full of paperwork but my stepmom who passed away many years
02:08 ago was very organized and she had these folders full
02:14 of old knitting magazines that had belonged to my grandmother and there was
02:22 a few little words in them but the patterns were really fun very nostalgic
02:29 these were all from the 40s and early 50s i love Jane that
02:36 tweed look jim an extraordinary guy so some of these had names on them some of
02:44 them were you know I I kept part of the photo i love her hat with that wonderful
02:51 feather here and so I wanted to create something special where I could use
02:58 these images and sort of give in to some nostalgia that era of really beautiful
03:07 fashion and just have a memory from my grandmother as well i notice in this
03:16 envelope are also I think these were from a different magazine maybe from Flo
03:21 magazine and this is Gloria Steinum good morning Teddy or sorry this is um uh the
03:29 Getty family i can't remember her first name there's the beautiful Maya
03:35 Angelou there's only one in this whole envelope of images that was in color i
03:43 still have some of the complete magazines as well but I started to see the transition from the knitting
03:50 magazines to the black from the black and white to these color examples she
03:55 kind of reminds me of Nancy Drew a little bit love that look on her face
04:01 but I'm going to focus Good morning Katie B i'm going to focus this morning
04:07 or this month on this idea of these black and white images and when we were
04:14 Good morning everyone um this morning I lost my train of thought when I was we
04:22 were working on moving my dad it was a long week it was a stressful week and a couple of evenings uh in our Airbnb i
04:29 really enjoy just sitting and cutting out these images and I do this often at
04:35 home if I I get a new magazine I read a magazine cover to cover and then I go and cut out all the images that I want
04:42 and recycle the magazines love the sort of cheeky look on her face there so
04:50 that's um that's my plan we're going to see how it's going to go but the first
04:55 thing that we're going to do today is talk about how do we turn this book into
05:03 a usable journal that actually closes and I don't want to lose all these fun
05:10 little [Music]
05:16 words so this was a book i don't even know where this came from i found a
05:23 bookstore up in Estis Park Colorado owned by the friends of the library and
05:29 they have a back room that has books that are four for a dollar not 25 cents
05:35 they always say that you have to take four and it's such a fun opportunity to go in and I found some real treasures so
05:43 this one might have come from there and it's an old recycled library book they
05:50 often end up in stores and um look Teddy
05:55 it's almost it's Homeman instead of Hostman well that's blurry you can't read that but the author's name is H O M
06:03 but when I was thinking about this theme of nostalgia I really loved this little
06:09 picture on the front and I'm going to zoom in here which also means I'm gonna
06:14 have to fuss yeah that's really blurry fuss with my focus here for just a second bear with me while I switch my
06:22 camera lens see if we can get that a little bit more clear on there and so
06:30 we're going to talk about how to alter these books this one
06:35 the book is about St theres and the roses so I really loved the the title
06:40 look at that beautiful page page it has some lovely
06:46 illustrations just in the front no it has a few illustrations look it's already had some pages torn out by me or
06:55 someone i also really love this has fairly large print in it which is great
07:01 for doing found poetry or cut out words and it's uh Hi Karen welcome welcome and
07:10 if you've never altered a book like this and you are thinking Minette you're
07:15 crazy i can't possibly tear up a book let me tell you something about what happens to old books a number of years
07:22 ago on one of our big moves across country which we have done a few of we
07:28 were trying to get rid of books and nobody wanted them it's really hard to
07:35 get rid of especially really old books libraries won't even take them they want newer books and so a lot of them just
07:43 end up in the landfill and that to me is a trag tragedy so using these beautiful
07:50 old books as our own art journals for me is a great way to recycle them and reuse
07:57 them and then we're not having to buy journals either which of course I also
08:03 love to do because you know you can never have too many journals i have been on a bit of a bookmaking frenzy lately
08:11 and uh having a blast with it but again this little image I really loved now if
08:17 I didn't like this image I might paint the cover of the journal i would gesso
08:22 it use acrylic paints but I actually I love the blue i love the image so I'm going to keep the the cover as it is but
08:30 as we start to look inside the book if I started to stack a whole bunch of stuff
08:37 and build up pages in this journal it's going to get really chunky and it's not
08:43 going to close anymore so I'm going to go through and we're actually going to take out some of the pages in the
08:51 book and where I can see some have already been ripped out i must have used them for another project we're going to
08:58 look at making some pockets we're going to rip some pages out we're going to glue some pages together to make them a
09:05 little bit stronger so this is from 1955 from Vision
09:12 Books this one is from uh Toronto actually and um interesting it says that
09:19 the the imprint is from Francis Cardinal Spelman who was the Archbishop of New
09:26 York at the time so I kind of like some of this history i
09:33 definitely like the pictures of her so I'm going to leave this one as it is is that the year you were born Teddy 1955 i
09:41 think you're 10 years older than I am i was born in 1965 so I really want to keep these front
09:49 images and maybe even the copyright so that I remember the year of the
09:57 copyright but then I'm going to come in and I'm just going to tear out carefully
10:02 some chunks of pages i did grab an Xacto knife in case they didn't want to come
10:08 out and the reason I'm doing this is just to create some space in the journal and for
10:18 stacking and building up collage 1966 yeah I think we're all of an age tori uh
10:25 Kitty what year were you guys born so I think we're definitely all similar let me take some of this back out again that
10:32 I stuck in [Music] there and so I'm just going to flip
10:38 through so I love this French lace and fine jewels and I'm looking at this one
10:45 and when I think about some of the collage elements in these ideas 51 59
10:50 love it um you know there I don't necessarily want to get rid of the illustrations on
10:57 the pages so I'm going to keep that page as [Music]
11:03 is and then I want to start to think about how some of these might fit and
11:09 they're going to become part of scenes so what we're going to do differently in this book than we've done before is our
11:16 paper dolls aren't going to be movable so we're actually going to adhere our purple Yeah totally the Golden Girls
11:24 we're going to adhere our dolls into our books to make more of an art journal
11:31 style collection of dolls and you can find so many amazing vintage images you
11:39 may have old black and white photos in your own stash that you could use to do
11:44 this with or you may um look on Etsy and
11:50 purchase some vintage imagery or go to a local thrift store or antique mall where
11:57 they will often have old pattern books of different kinds and you will it's not
12:02 hard to find these old black and white images so I'm going to take out a couple
12:10 more here i just want to start to go through so
12:17 this feels just a little bit chunky here i'm gonna just trim out some of
12:24 this so if I'm working in it I want those pages to lie nice and flat i don't
12:30 want to overcut it though because I don't want to cut through the seam of that
12:38 book but I do want to get some of these pages and if I do overcut it then I can
12:44 repair it with paper tape or washi
12:50 tape do you mean like the pages so that one did because I trimmed it a little
12:56 bit and um every book is different so this one
13:01 they're coming out pretty easily sometimes depending on how old they are in the glue you might have to work a
13:08 little harder to get them out neater but you can see these are not coming out
13:14 right so you just have to kind of it depends on the the book that you're working with i love all these chapters
13:21 that have the images in them are really
13:27 beautiful so you can see this one got cut a little bit so we'll just pull that
13:32 one out we're going to keep that one and if I'm careful I can get it
13:40 right to the center and I don't mind i'm kind of
13:46 taking out like three to four pages I think and if I'm you know I don't want a
13:52 lot of this in there i love the title of this chapter
13:59 is the fine thread breaks it might make for an interesting story
14:16 and I have no idea what the book is about i didn't read the book right i love this one is called The New Garden
14:23 so I'm going to figure out how I want to feature these images i'm thinking maybe
14:28 some clear gesso and watercolor might be fun on some of
14:37 these and some of the pages I'm going to glue together because we want the pages
14:44 to be a little bit stronger and hold together to be able to easily add wet
14:51 media to the books
14:59 and as I get more to the center of the book we'll see if they come out easier
15:04 or more challenging so this obviously was in
15:12 some kids house because it has some fun uh pencil marks in
15:23 there there's somebody for the next few days the family noticed right so we're
15:29 going to do some fun word play and create some story here but you get the
15:34 idea where we're going with the book and you can take the time to tear all of
15:42 more little pencil scratches to tear all of the pages so this was stories of great
15:48 Catholics to inspire young hearts it was a a series
15:55 about the lives of great Catholic figures martyrs and saints i wonder if this one also came
16:02 from my dad's house so um no because they were Protestant uh I
16:07 grew up Catholic but um my dad's family was Protestant so I don't I can't even
16:15 tell you where this book came from but it adds to the nostalgia for me
16:23 knowing some of its origin okay so the next thing that we're going
16:30 to do to start working in our book is I'm going to glue some of the pages
16:36 together to just make them a little bit more sturdy and I'm going to do that and
16:42 try it just with a glue stick and if needed I might um switch over to matte
16:50 medium but I'm going to start just with a glue stick here
16:56 could also do this with a nice double stick tape if I run out of glue stick I will
17:04 switch to matte medium and I'm going to start from in close to the spine and
17:10 just really push that over to the edge of the book make sure I get that nice
17:17 and glued down and again this is just so we can put some wet media on it i'm
17:23 looking at this one thinking okay these pages with the images I want to put some
17:29 clear gesso on and on some of the other pages I
17:35 would come in and do white gesso to just start to prep the pages so I'm going to
17:41 kind of do these one at a time i'm going to use my craft dryer as I go
17:52 i remember as a young girl lots of the women in my family um did different
17:60 kinds of fiber arts knitted crocheted and
18:05 uh they tried so many times to teach me how to knit they even sent me to one of
18:12 my aunts by marriage that was left-handed like I was and I could just
18:17 never ever get the hang of knitting so you can see as soon as I
18:24 start to add that gesso my pages are
18:29 buckling in the center and I'm wondering if I use matte medium in the centers
18:36 instead of the glue stick if I might be able to get a smoother lay down and I
18:44 can see I don't want to overwork this because the image is starting to pull up
18:51 in the text a little bit so we just don't know how a book is going to react
18:56 until we start so for me this is just a big fat old experiment as usual I'm
19:03 probably going to make some mistakes as I go along i think I'm going
19:10 to So another fun idea let me just hit this with a dryer it's almost dry but
19:16 bear with me just a second you prefer crochet was it easier to learn
19:42 no hi Ivonne good to see you my
19:48 friend okay I just want this to be dry enough so I can flip the
19:56 page so now it is pretty smooth i can see my edges are coming up just a little
20:03 bit and I thought I still had my double
20:08 stick tape over here and I'm wondering if it all got put
20:15 away okay I might use glue stick just for now and then find some I also have some painters
20:23 tape so here I have this much thicker page if I were going to paint on the
20:29 back of this side I would also gesso this one but what I want to
20:36 do in this case look at this beautiful B blank page and then we're back over here
20:42 to another sweet illustration as well is I'm gonna turn this into a full page
20:50 pocket that we can slide things inside and out and pull so we might make some
20:59 tags or cards that we can actually pull out of the journal you kept dropping stitches and
21:06 knitting that's hilarious i'm glad I'm not the only one who found knitting challenging and um I ended up
21:13 discovering that I loved other kinds of needle arts like um needle point you
21:18 know when I was a kid it was the era of rug hooking um I did some rug
21:24 hooking so I'm just going to put a nice thick layer right along the edges of
21:30 this page
21:37 and I'm going to fold that over in just a second but before I do that I am going
21:43 to trim a little half circle more or less in the
21:48 center of that page that'll make it easy to pull the pockets or pull whatever's
21:56 in the pocket out and do I have something round sitting in front of me
22:05 i'm wanting that to be just a little bit neater so I'm just going to take the bottle of my matte medium
22:13 there and get kind of a That's a bigger circle but I think that's good i'm going
22:19 to cut this out and this is a project we're going to
22:24 work in over the next few weeks and continue to add to it my goal
22:32 would be to actually in these four sessions to more or less finish this journal so that it becomes a
22:41 keepsake of all of these images from my grandmother okay that came out messier i
22:48 might do that a little bit differently on the next one but I will just add some
22:53 paint or something and I'm going to really work
22:59 that glue stick i might even take my bone [Music]
23:09 folder and so that gets really dry if it needs reinforcing I might add some washi
23:16 tape or other tape on the end but the goal will be that we'll make something
23:22 pretty to be able to stick inside that pocket she's too big for the pocket but
23:28 now I have this you know builtin pocket i have this lovely white peach i have
23:35 another one of these images and I'm just curious what happens
23:40 if I just get a little white gesso going
23:48 and I'm using old Starbucks gift cards to do this so that I get a very
23:57 thin layer of gesso and what I love about this is I
24:04 can still see the image and the text underneath
24:15 and I'm noticing with the white gesso that what I liked about the clear gesso
24:20 is that I keep the color of the paper
24:26 right so I can still see the vintage yellow of the paper so this changes it
24:32 up a little bit more but I'm going to go ahead and do that on both sides here
24:38 because I know I'm going to want to paint up and
24:45 decorate this other
24:51 page and you could certainly create this kind of nostalgic
24:57 altered book in any journal but as I mentioned there's something kind of
25:02 magical about doing it in an old book so you're getting the the story of the book
25:10 coming through as well
25:16 as whatever new images colors and stories and you know this is sort of
25:22 that origin of art journaling is all about creating layers and often times
25:29 those layers have a lot of meaning to be added to them it's not you know there's
25:36 many uh beautiful beautiful journals out there but there's also people who really
25:41 use their art journaling in order to tell a story and so for me I want
25:48 this one to tell a story of my grandmother of fashion of these you know
25:56 maybe these women are going to take on whole new characters right of like she just looks
26:03 a little fierce and strong and so I'm sensing that each one of these is going
26:09 to have a story to tell i'm going to get this nice and dry
26:40 and when you think about nostalgia think about what does that mean to you right
26:45 and it's um I have a a wonderful friend and client who talks a lot about
26:52 nostalgia in her work and how it's not about going back to some you know
26:59 perceived better time but it's really about just sort of remembering what were
27:06 the gifts of the past um our childhood i'm gonna try matte medium as the sealer
27:14 on these two pages and see what happens and so it's fun to sort of
27:21 travel down a little bit of memory lane my father's mother died when I was
27:27 pretty young maybe late elementary school or even middle
27:33 school and I don't have tons of memories of her i can still see her sitting in
27:40 her [Music] chair in her living room she had this
27:46 funny little miniature pincher named Tiger um who was really mean he was not
27:53 um a particularly sweet
27:58 dog but he was definitely a cute dog okay so that was much smoother i
28:06 didn't get all those wrinkles in the pages so the matte medium for gluing those pages together worked a little bit
28:14 nicer and again everything is an experiment so we don't know and I can
28:21 see that I'm getting glue on some of these other pages down here so I'm just
28:26 going to lift those up a little bit and some people when they're doing this kind of book making they will glue three or
28:34 four of the book pages together i am not going to do that i
28:40 think two is probably enough and I might end up tearing out more pages but even
28:46 with the matte medium I'm going to get a little bit of that buckling it's unavoidable with this old thin paper but
28:54 I'm actually okay with the texture
29:02 again just getting keeping everything nice and
29:21 dry using parchment paper for what Karen
29:28 for keeping them from sticking together yes normally I would stick something underneath the pages um even just a
29:36 piece of scrap paper or something yes I'm usually good about doing that and I
29:41 just did not do that today all right so I'm gonna maybe we'll
29:48 try gluing three together and see what happens but you can start to me back
29:54 this up a little bit you can already start to see how this is having some
30:01 spaciousness in the pages right so that I'm going to have some room to add some
30:08 collage in here so I won't spend the whole time today um prepping the pages
30:16 but just to give you some ideas of how you might begin to alter this book and I
30:21 will continue to work on mine as well and I think one of the fun things about
30:28 this process is this idea of uh being
30:33 able to add a variety of different pockets and different elements different
30:39 collage so I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to glue th this one together and
30:45 then I'm going to add collage to this one and maybe start to put an image on it so I'm going to come in here you can
30:52 even seal the pages if you don't have clear gesso you can
30:59 100% get a piece of scratch paper here thank you for the
31:05 reminder um you can 100% seal the pages with matte medium and work up from the
31:12 matte medium as well
31:28 and the pages in this book are pretty thick i've worked in some books that are
31:35 much much thinner there's a to-do list on there that's turning purple from something
31:42 else and so if I were working in an old book
31:48 that had really fine paper I would probably want to glue more pages
31:55 together all right so I have sealed those two and I have sealed this
32:00 page and I have some happy little collage bits left from a class I taught
32:08 last weekend and I'm going to come in and just get one of these down because
32:14 my curiosity is and I think I'm just going to do this whole page because it's a pretty
32:20 page is combining the black and white with some color and what's the story we
32:27 can tell when we start to bring some color i may decide I want to actually
32:32 color the images
32:37 i may leave them black and white i may need to soften all of this color with
32:45 something else i may want to add some stencils and marks to it but I want to
32:50 start to just get a sense of where I want
32:55 the story to go how I want it to look i certainly you know remember my childhood
33:02 in full color not black and white
33:08 and let's
33:16 see just looking at all these little different
33:23 images kind of like her i like her and it's interesting in the magazine
33:29 a lot of them were not full body images right they were partial so they fit kind
33:38 of fun on there but you can see that it's a little bit busy i like the color
33:46 but I think I'm going to want to push some of that color back quite a bit so
33:51 that we make her pop out and I I
33:58 I Okay I'm going to paint the whole page first and then I'm going to glue her i was going to paint around her but I
34:04 think I'm going to glue the whole page first so this is the part where we get to really start to play and experiment
34:11 and layer up the stories and this I did a mixed media
34:19 class for my Sisterhood of Wisdom and Wonder monthly membership program last
34:24 week and I really loved this palette that I was working with so your journal
34:31 might want to have a consistent color theme that is not usually something I do
34:38 i tend to like lots of different colors but this palette was really fun to work with so I'm thinking I'm going to stick
34:45 with this palette which was just a turquoise a cad yellow cadmium yellow
34:51 and a fluorescent pink and black and white and with those three colors I can make such a fun variety of different
34:58 colors and so I think I'm gonna stick with that palette and I'm wondering so here's one
35:06 that is more yellow these fun little dictionary pages
35:12 and you can see how she pops out much better with less color but I can see
35:18 that she's still going to need maybe some black outlines around her so
35:23 there's some things I'm going to want to do to make her stand out on this page
35:33 so I'm going to start with gesso just a thin layer of gesso let it
35:39 mix with that wet matte
35:48 medium and yes I'm painting over that pretty painty page
35:53 letting it go what I want is the texture and the
36:08 layers and then I'm going to right on top of that get the gunk out of the end right
36:15 on top of that I'm going to come in with a [Music] layer just a really thin layer
36:24 which is this one this is an Azo yellow deep which is like one of my most favorite yellows made by
36:34 Amsterdam so I'm not completely painting out what's underneath i'm just adding
36:39 some cohesiveness some congruence to the page
36:45 and I may have this page match or may have something completely different on
36:51 this page actually I have this yellow so I'm just going to get this yellow right
36:59 down on the paper without the collage and we're just going to start to paint
37:05 these up and see what happens
37:18 and when I am done here for the day I'm going to want this to get really really
37:24 dry before I go on and I'll leave the book open and if you're working on
37:29 multiple pages at once in a journal if you want to like gesso a whole bunch and glue a whole bunch you can let your book
37:37 stand up and work on multiple pages at a time and then let it dry by letting it
37:43 also stand up a little bit so I can see I'm getting some of that yellow
37:49 everywhere so good thing I like that
37:55 yellow so just a little tip i'm letting this get I want this to be super dry so I'm going to hit it with a dryer before
38:02 I collage my figure on here
38:46 so having a craft dryer or just a hair dryer
38:51 on hand can really speed up the art journaling process okay and now I'm
38:57 going to So now she's starting to stand out quite a bit better it's almost as if
39:04 she's standing in a
39:09 doorway and I'm just going to try some on for sigh so here she is it looks like
39:15 she's sitting so this one feels fun like maybe she's sitting my hands are all
39:21 painty sitting in the in the grass and maybe there's a beautiful bouquet of
39:28 flowers like she feels very glamorous and because she's darker and has a lot
39:33 more contrast she's standing out better on the page right so this one look how
39:41 simple that is right and I might not need to do much of anything to that one
39:46 this one feels like there is a lot more going on and a lot to think
39:55 about like her as well this looks like a um like a high school yearbook photo
40:02 with the the position and look at the hair right so I'm going to start with
40:09 this glamorous sweetheart here is the one that feels and I think this is the same model
40:17 it looks like the same model and I really love her sort of glamorous but
40:24 she's kind of like fierce you know not going to take any um you know what off
40:30 of anyone so there seems to be already a fun story starting to emerge around
40:37 these this particular lady um and one of the words that I cut out of
40:46 the magazines it must have been the name of a pattern was the enchantress and she
40:51 kind of has that glamour look so one of the questions that's in my head right
40:58 now I'm going to seal her onto the page with matte medium and I'm trying to
41:04 decide if I want to find some more colorful collage elements to add to the
41:11 page or maybe come in just with a black marker or even a Stabilo Marxol pencil
41:20 and draw in some details s around her i could also stencil around her with paint
41:28 i'm looking at the page edges thinking I definitely want to get my distress ink
41:34 pads out and maybe darken up the edges of those pages so this is the place
41:40 where each one of these pages has the opportunity to tell a deeper story
41:50 so I'm going to get her down on the page where I want
41:55 her that word is going to go on the page somewhere and I always forget to put the
42:02 lid back on my glue stick and I want her to be really smooth
42:08 and not wrinkled on the page so I'm going to get that glue on the back of
42:14 her as well as on to the page and I'm realizing this
42:20 has a lot of yellow on it and I don't necessarily want all that yellow on
42:27 her so I'm going to use my finger here for a minute which probably also has lots of yellow on it
42:35 and I'm really going to focus on smoothing that image out i'm going to
42:41 clean off my card and use the other side
42:48 and that was one of the secrets I learned from my friend Andrea Sheblau from a work of art studio when you're
42:55 working with um thicker images or magazine images that if you put the
43:02 matte medium on the surface and on the back of the image it helps it go down
43:07 and stick better you get really smooth edges and then we put the matte medium over the top of the image to seal it in
43:14 in case we want to paint or draw over the top of that
43:23 image yes acrylics can be so messy yes I love that you ended up with orange and
43:28 Tory pink i love it it has a name yes my phone is covered i have splatters on my
43:35 keyboard and of course all over myself as
43:41 well all right so it feels like she wants to be maybe sort of like
43:49 sitting on a ledge or a bench like I want to sort of land her in the
43:56 landscape a little better so she could be sitting on the ground she could be
44:03 sitting in a field of flowers but there's something about
44:09 incorporating her into the landscape a little bit more that feels
44:21 important and in typical Minette fashion I am just following my intuition here
44:29 there is no sort of rhyme or rhythm
44:35 to what I'm doing with each page i'm sitting with the image and
44:41 really thinking about that image it could be maybe even a little darker
44:46 green thinking about what's the story that the image has to tell this is for
44:52 me where the magic of intuitive art comes in is that I'm being guided by the
45:01 process not really dictating the process and where
45:07 things need to go or that they need to look a certain way and you notice I'm
45:13 just fingerpainting here because I love fingerpainting
45:23 and again I just want it to look like you know she's there's a foreground here
45:29 and a reason why like to make her not feel like she's
45:39 floating on the surface of the peeper but that she's
45:45 grounded here
45:51 and always working in really thin layers and I'm using acrylic you could
45:58 absolutely do this project 100% with collage
46:05 elements and no paint other than glue and you know tape like you don't have to
46:12 paint it but it felt important for me to do that so already it feels better she
46:19 feels a little more grounded in the landscape and now okay I'm like if this
46:24 is a landscape then I want maybe some blue and white in that top part up
46:31 there she definitely is going to get some other feels like flowers want to be
46:38 collaged in there or drawn in there it feels like I want to cover up this
46:44 little bit of her skirt here with something so that she becomes more
46:50 incorporated into the page
46:58 and I can see from how long it's taking me just to do this one page that this is
47:05 going to be you know one of those projects that could take a long time and
47:12 that I don't want to rush this project that I want to because it
47:21 feels nostalgic right and a little special not precious because if I treat
47:27 it as precious then you know I might become afraid I'll mess it up but there's some joyfulness here in doing
47:36 this that um makes me want to take my time so now I like it because it feels
47:43 like the light is kind of flowing around
47:48 her and it's too much blue so I want to push that blue back just a little
47:55 bit i'm cleaning off my uh scraper here so I keep those edges
48:02 nice and clean and I don't get the the paint and everything i got some paint on
48:08 my words i'm going to Baby wipes are another like musthave in the studio
48:24 and I love using them for moving paint around this the page and getting some of
48:31 these lovely more transparent layers on the page it's a great way when we get
48:39 more paint down than perhaps we wanted is that it
48:46 gives us that chance to just push some of that back it also helps to continue
48:51 to create the lovely transparency and I'm noticing I can see
48:56 the line of that collage there and so maybe I want to just see if we can get a
49:03 little line of maybe clouds in there in the sky and just work so that
49:12 line is just a little bit less
49:21 obvious all right not perfect i'm not looking for perfection but it
49:28 certainly doesn't feel finished but it feels like a fun first layer and now I
49:34 have to decide if I want to do some
49:42 handdrawn marks on this or some collage and I'm kind of feeling like the
49:47 handdrawn elements feel kind of fun like maybe um even like a a
49:54 zenangled frame around the edges to kind of frame her on the page and a few
50:01 little drawn botanicals would kind of sit her into the page she
50:08 also now I've lost the word again
50:13 she's also going to get her once that paint is dry this already has some paint
50:18 this is going to be a story about her it may end up with some other words as well
50:24 but that seems to really define her i have a beautiful old
50:31 picture of my mother when I think it might even have been prom but in high
50:37 school in this gorgeous dress and she looked I always remember loving the
50:42 picture because she looked so glamorous it was such a different age
51:04 and I don't want to draw on this page at
51:10 all with any of my good pens until I make sure this is super super dry
51:27 and sometimes if you overd dry it the matte medium can get um a little sticky
51:34 right so I'm just being mindful of that and I'm liking this idea of maybe a
51:42 frame around three sides almost as if you know either you're looking through a
51:48 window like the her story is like we're looking at her through this lens of this
51:55 frame so I'm just going to grab my pencil i already have kind of a natural line
52:03 around the edge where that collage
52:08 was i'm just winging it not even worrying about it being too straight
52:34 now I have to think about what pattern do I want in there i'm almost feeling like maybe
52:41 um Flux is one of my favorite Zenangle patterns but it also feels like this
52:46 nice sort of viny pattern around her and I think I'm going to use
52:53 my Ident pen which just works really nicely over the top of the acrylic paint
53:06 i'm just going to come in and take my time flux is just this lovely
53:14 little leaf shape that can get stacked i might put a few
53:22 little muka patterns in here but just kind of start to create a nice
53:31 little organic flow in here some of them might
53:38 even just a little bit sneak over on that other side as well
53:46 maybe she's sitting under an [Music]
53:51 arbor and I'm gonna fuss with my focus again and we're going to get in really
53:58 close there bear with
54:03 me i don't have the capacity for super zooming in let's see i get back that on
54:10 the camera yes and so I can also come
54:15 in and add some little orbs in between as if we've got
54:22 some little berries sprouting in our
54:30 vine we went for a walk yesterday and the currents were just starting to come
54:35 on the current bushes
54:41 we'll start to just give these some character
55:03 here i think I'm going to like this it's going to be really simple
55:08 it's going to take me a while to finish up this pattern so I will have to finish
55:15 this page up a little bit later but you kind of get the idea and the
55:22 concept and how we're just starting to build up the pages of the journal
55:41 now I'm going to be obsessed with this project and want to work on it every day
56:07 all of a sudden I'm thinking about The Secret Garden one of my favorite childhood
56:23 novels and you can see this is starting to come along nicely i really love how
56:30 the pattern is showing up especially on the yellow part of the design and so
56:41 I'm probably going to come in and add some white highlights here but it's a
56:47 good start on the page and it's a good start on creating our altered journal as
56:56 well so I'll continue to work in this and next week we'll work on um a doll
57:04 that'll go inside of our pocket here but I hope you'll play along with me in this
57:12 project um reach out if you need resources just tag me in the the comments and I'm happy to share some
57:20 resources for finding these images again you can find them pretty easily vintage
57:26 images that are royalty and copyright free online or sets of them for sale on
57:32 Etsy or go through some of those stacks of old black and white family photos
57:39 lying around yeah the next step is to to pick a book um thrift stores are a great
57:47 place used bookstores and what you're looking for is just a not too
57:54 large like this one is maybe an inch thick it doesn't need to be a super
57:60 thick book you don't want it to be um a daunting project but just to something a
58:07 little on that smaller side that we're going to convert and we're going to add tags we're going to add pockets more
58:15 pockets like this one you know knowing me it's going to need to have some ribbons and dangles hanging off of it um
58:24 I'm going to love the the cover is going to get messy and painty and like the
58:30 best way and I got some decisions to make about the illustrations that are in
58:35 the book but loving how the story Yes um Avon I did I pulled out about four pages
58:43 at a time and then I've also glued two pages back to back to um make them a
58:51 little bit stronger yep so um and it depends like if the paper's super thin you might need
58:58 to glue three or four pages together to get that stronger page but you definitely want to pull some pages out
59:05 to create some space for doing the collage in the book so that is our
59:10 project beginnings for the month excited to um work in this project i was ready
59:18 to keep going with the paper dolls but definitely needed something fresh and
59:24 different so I'm going to call this month paper dollish because they're static um and glued into the journals so
59:32 this is combining my love of art journaling intuitive collage and paper
59:38 dolls into a nostalgic keepsake project thanks everybody fun to be with you and
59:45 I look forward to seeing all of you uh next week have a beautiful rest of your
59:51 week and whether you're catching the replay or joining me live thank you please click like on the video if you
59:57 like what I'm sharing helps other people know it is a video worth watching and as
60:02 always your comments and participation mean the world thanks everybody and I'll see you next week
Comments