Art Journaling with Sketchy images and marks by Ellie Knol

March 19, 2021

A good day to you.. Ellie Knol here...
I hope you are doing well!

I had a play in an Art Journal,
to be true it was a challenge in my FB Dutch Art Journal group.
I gave the participants one assignment per day, as prompts, and also tips to go along with it.
They turned out to be 7 days of assignments.

I decided to share the days (steps) with you, why not?

We had fun!

STEP 1
Optional : prime the pages with a thin layer of gesso and leave to dry.
Spray over a mask (from Magenta) with a pearl ink spray and close the journal.
Let it sit for a while, until the ink is (almost) dry.
This will give you 2 pages colored at once, mirrored coloring of course.

STEP 2
Spray the spread with a fixative, and leave to dry.
Tear music themed bookpaper and use the edges of the paper (and maybe the title of the music) to create a frame around the spread as shown.
All the edges must be a torn edge. Also adhere some bookpaper with notes within the frame.
I used a glue stick to stick these papers down, to not contaminate the ink underneath, to be on the safe side apply glue to the torn pieces of paper.

STEP 3
Stamp mixed media, background stamps, with a dark ink eg black. Keep in mind where your focal images are going to be.

STEP 4
Color some of the elements on the page to emphasize them with watercolor pencils.

STEP 5
Stamp a big stamp onto each side of the spread, where you want your focal point to be.
Use a stamping platform so you can stamp several times as big stamps tend to fail to stamp nicely in only one layer.

STEP 6
(pages above and below this text)
Stamp the same images onto a separate sheets of paper.
Sponge over it with various colors of distress inks, making sure to use at least one of the colors (yellow-green) used for the spraying in step 1.
Also use other colors (red-orange) that will contrast with the overall color of the spread.
Mist with water to make the colors merge into each other.
Leave to dry.

Tear a shape (heart) from the sponged images; make sure it will align with the stamped image on the page for placement, but also for the shape to be upright.
Stamp a second flower and some leaves, fussycut them, to add to the collage of the heart.
Adhere to the spread (pages).

STEP 7

(pages above and below this text)
Finish the pages off.

I added some journaling, white accents with an acrylic marker,
red stamping in the background, additional color to the stamped images to make them pop more,
doodling around the heart shape with black, red and black splatters;

mostly in the focal point area.

AND doodling around the spread (torn paper) with black.

This last step is very important to be able to add contrasts in light and darks, and in color.