Rainbow Art Journal – Rainbow Girl

Behold! For I have finally reached the very last page of my Rainbow Art Journal. After this illustration, I get to close this sketchbook, take it off my art table, and file it away on a shelf. It has taken me five – FIVE – years to finish this art journal. There was so much procrastinating and so many lengthy breaks where it just sat abandoned on my art table. I have started and completed so many other art projects during that span of time but this particular journal and project was a malingerer. I am, therefore, very happy to have accomplished my art mission for this Summer break in finishing this journal.

For this last drawing, I took my inspiration from one of my sisters. When we were kids, she was really into Rainbow Brite. We never saw the show (did it even air in Britain?) but I had won three of the plush toys in a competition and, having no interest in them (I think I was 9 and had never been into dolls) I gave them to my sister. She absolutely loved them and expanded her collection. Anyway, my idea was to draw a less cartoony, less cutesy Rainbow Brite but there was a twist: I decided to challenge myself to create the illustration entirely from memory, without any visual references whatsoever. I actually remembered the costume pretty accurately in terms of the arms being comprised of stripes but with a preponderance of blue. I decided to steer away from the original costume while maintaining the stripes and translating it into a blockier design. Where I was completely adrift from the original character was with the hair. While I got the hairstyle right, I had completely misremembered the colour. I really believed her hair and been rainbow coloured but, nope, she was just blonde or ginger – depending on the incarnation. Never mind my memory fail because I actually like the rainbow hair for the purposes of my journal.

Incidentally, the washi tape is not really a compositional element, though I decided to let it peek through a thin layer of white paint. This poor art journal has taken a beating and some of the pages are separating from the binding. The tape was, therefore, entirely practical.

Although I am glad to be finally saying farewell to this project after all of these years, I am glad I undertook it. In some ways it has been useful that it took me so long because I can look at the early pages of this sketchbook and see how far I have progressed with my skills. For example, the way I draw faces has improved a lot. It also does work well as a record of my experiments with different colour combinations. There are many that I would use again. I have also learned that turquoise really does go with everything. However, I have also decided – especially in this past 18 months – that I am no longer very interested in mixed media. I definitely feel more “me” as an artist when I am using ink and watercolour and I think, whether chicken or egg, that my skills are far better in those media than they are with others. I am, therefore, going to focus on ink and watercolour going forward – while challenging myself to get better with gouache because pushing myself out of my creative comfort zone is never a bad thing.

I have lots of ideas for future art projects. I think I work most efficiently when I work on a series but what I am considering is running a few series at the same time, one that is simple I can work on on days when I have tiny portions of free time and one that is more involved. Once I figure it all out, I will be sharing that art over on Pict Ink. Stay tuned I guess.

Rainbow Art Journal – Circling Rainbow

This is the penultimate page in my Rainbow Art Journal. I am almost there! As I so often do, I decided to draw a female figure with a circular disc in the background but this time I drew several discs so that they could form circular bands, one for each colour of the simplified rainbow (purple in place of indigo and violet). Don’t judge my geometry skills: I do not own a compass so I traced the red circle and then eyeballed the other rings from there. There are definite flaws in this piece and things I would do-over but, even with those and the wobbly not-concentric circles, I am pretty pleased with this illustration. So much so, indeed, that I rather wish this was the final page in the art journal because I have a suspicion my final drawing will not be up to snuff.

Spectrum Sprites

This week’s Art Journal Adventure prompt was “7”.  It’s the type of prompt that allows a lot of scope for interpretation and creates a lot of possibilities.  I was thinking continents, layers, or colours of the rainbow.  I liked the idea of working with lots of vibrant colours as an antidote to all of these desaturated winter days so I decided to go with the rainbow idea.  I divided my page up into seven strips and then the little figures with the curling hoods just emerged on the page.  They are a little reminiscent of the Alpha and Omega figures I painted recently, though the echo wasn’t conscious.  I filled the figures with watercolour, added the facial features, and that was it.  Quick and easy.

Outward from the Centre

Last week’s Art Journal Adventure prompt was “outward from the centre”.  I initially had a much more complex and time consuming idea in mind but it took me over a week to even get the chance to open my art journal so I decided to ditch that idea and produce a simple illustration in ink and watercolour instead.  I drew a figure – somewhat inspired by Lady Rainicorn from ‘Adventure Time’ – by taking the prompt literally and starting at the centre and working my way outwards in a spiral.  Then it was simply a case of filling in the figure with watercolour and drawing in the details using black ink.

Rainbow Wing

Last week’s Art Journal Adventure prompt was “wing it”.  Finding time for art this week was a major challenge.  We are all adjusting to a new routine.  My four kids are in three different schools; the oldest has to catch a bus half an hour earlier than last year, which means pulling our morning routine half an hour earlier.    It’s a chaotic transition period.  I feel like I am either chasing my tail constantly or trying to catch myself up throughout the whole day.  Exhaustion is the dominant theme of my life right now.  We will keep tweaking things until we get the schedule running like a well oiled machine but, until then, my free time for art is severely curtailed.

Therefore, “winging it” is exactly what I did with this journal page.  I decided to not put much thought or planning into it, to just use my art journal as a decompression tool and enjoy the process rather than focusing on the outcome.  Winging it made me think of bird wings and feathers so that gave me my subject.  To ensure that I didn’t get too fussy or tight with my drawing, I decided to “wing it” again: I dipped a chubby paint brush in black acrylic and drew the wing with my non-dominant hand.  In retrospect, using my left hand maybe wasn’t the best idea.  After filling in the negative space with black acrylic and letting the whole thing dry, it was time to add colour.  I did so by just splashing some pigment rich watercolour paints into the feather shapes and letting it run all over the place.

It is just as well that I was not focused on the outcome because the outcome is pretty rubbish really.  My ten year old tactfully told me it was “not the best”.  I like the idea of a wing made of rainbow feathers and might return to that at some stage.  This page, however, is what it is.  I “winged it” for sure.

Iris

Last week’s Art Journal Adventure prompt was “colour gradations”.  I was greedy and decided I wanted to use all of the colours of the rainbow rather than shades of one colour for a monochromatic scheme.  That gave me the idea of drawing Iris.  I painted Iris, goddess of the rainbow, last year with mixed results and there are definite echos of that piece in my art journal illustrations – the black background, the pale hair, the sweeping curve of the body – but in a more naive style.  I jump between styles a lot.  That probably makes me a “Jack of all trades and master of none” but it also stops me getting creatively stuck and bored.

Word Clouds Raining Rainbows

Last week I had ten minutes of art time.  Ten.  That’s all, folks.  In a week that included an unplanned hospital visit, house guests, and a funeral on top of all my usual commitments, obligations, and time suckers, I was not only pushed for free time but also brimming over with stress.  I felt like it might just save my sanity if I could find some way to dig out 20 minutes for art.  That turned out to be ambitious and I got 10.  Knowing I didn’t have time to do anything too involved, too messy, or too detailed, I turned to the Art Journal Adventure prompt and opened up my art journal to a blank page.

The prompt was to feature scallops on the page.  Yum.  Scallops.  I don’t think I have eaten any since I left Scotland.  Divine wee morsels that they are.  When I thought of scallops as a shape rather than a food, I thought of the way child-like clouds are drawn and that gave me the inspiration for my page.  With no time to draw or paint, I quickly cut out some scallop-fringed cloud shapes from old book pages and adhered them to the top of the page.  I then added stripes of Neocolor II crayons and outlined the clouds with Stabilo All.  Both of these activate with water so I sprayed liberal quantities of water on the page, then tipped up the art journal to let it all run and dribble and drip.  And that was my 10 minutes all used up.  I left it to dry overnight and was actually fairly satisfied with the result given the (lack of) time and effort invested in its creation.  And it just goes to show me that a) I can put together an entire art journal page in very little time indeed if I keep things simple and work efficiently and b) even a little bit of art time can balance out a stressful week.

Rainbow Art Journal – Monochrome Beret Girl

This year I wanted to try working in an art journal dedicated to one theme.  I have worked in themes before, of course, as with my Greek Mythology drawings and my altered book that was full of monsters.  Even my first time participating in Inktober became thematic.  The difference with those, however, was that I was utilising the same techniques and deploying the same media over and over.  What I wanted to do was practice using a wide variety of media, combine them to revisit and practice the mixed media techniques I have been learning over the past few years, and challenge myself to create a coherent journal full of connected pages.  I decided to work on a really loose theme which was colour.  Easy peasy.  I bought a new journal (I like the spiral bound Cansons for their flexibility) and worked out how I would divide it between all the colours of the rainbow plus a few additional colours and black and white.  I do not have a timetable for working on this journal or a deadline for its completion.  No pressure.  I will work in it as and when time allows, maybe adding bits here and there while working on other projects as a good way to use up excess paint or bits of collage paper.  I will share each page as it is completed.

I am starting with black.  My first page was pretty simple because I grabbed the journal and worked on it while watching a movie with my kids one afternoon.  I just tucked up on the sofa with my fountain pen and drew the figure and didn’t worry about perfect proportions or angles.  It is an art journal so it is just for fun.  I added the wash of ink later that evening just to eradicate more of the white paper.  Simple.  And relaxing because it was simple.  Maybe this particular art journal will become a useful tool for decompression for me this year.

Alive!

Can you spot the mistake?

After two weeks of travelling and zero time for art, picking up my art journal again was a great means of getting back into a creative groove and add oil to the old and creaky art joints.  The Colour Me Positive prompt for last week was “Alive” so I decided to create a page on that theme.

The wee me character is one I previously featured in an art journal page for the theme of “Balance” and it was fun to feature her/me again in this page.  Alive made me think of vivaciousness and zest for life, diverse experiences, just the essence of vitality.  That was when the image of a figure leaping from a ring of rainbow colours entered my mind’s eye.

I am sure you spotted the mistake.  When adding watercolour into the ring encircling the figure, I let the yellow wander beyond the interior circle shape.  Doh.  Guess I need to add more oil to those rusty creative joints still.

Celebrate Diversity

This week’s Colour Me Positive art journal theme was “Celebrate”.  I think the idea of the prompt was for it to be personal and reflective, asking participants to celebrate something about themselves.  However, my immediate idea was for a wider scope.  I wanted to create a page inspired by a celebration of diversity.

Apologies for getting political for a moment but I have been rather despondent this past week following the Brexit referendum back home in the UK, despondent and livid actually.  I have always felt Scottish first and European second – never British oddly enough – so I was dismayed by the rejection of Europe as an institution.  I have been even more disheartened by many reports of a seemingly related increase in racial and xenophobic incidents.  It seems that for some all of the chatter about “taking back Britain” is about going all the way back to Anglo-Saxon homogeneity.  I feel that Britain is and always has been the richer for all of its cultural absorption and assimilation, its thriving immigrant communities, its diversity, and I think Britain will be impoverished should it be permitted to become more insular, less tolerant, less welcoming, less inclusive.  Of course, here in America too we are facing an election that has been dominated by a lot of loud talk about exclusion and intolerance.  The politics of fear and hate are festering on both shores of the Atlantic.

That was very much on my mind as I sat down to work in my journal this week.  I, therefore, chose to celebrate diversity, multiculturalism, difference, the spectrum of human existence, the things that elevate human existence from dull monochrome and make it vibrant and bright and interesting.  Since there are Pride celebrations happening all over the globe this month too it was not a stretch to think  of the symbolism of the rainbow to symbolise that celebration of diversity.  My art journal page, therefore, is an ink and watercolour illustration of a girl twirling in a rainbow coloured ribbon, so many complicated thoughts and feelings distilled into one simple image.