March Journal Spread

Yea!  This is the last spread in this journal.  It only took me 3 years and 2 months to finish!  I do jump around a lot - trying a little of this and a little of that, so I get to experience different types and formats of art along the way, but it is hell when it comes to actually FINISHING things!  So other than doing the covers for this journal, which I like to leave for last - this book is done.

This is another "a la Teesha" spread.  Lots of fun to do and all the pen work is very relaxing.
I am not a very laid back artist - guess I'm wound too tightly for that - but I admire the fun and freedom that comes through in Teesha's work.  Check her out here.

February Journal Pages

It's been quite a while since I've posted.  Much going on with my father and he has just recently moved into an assisted living facility.  Lots of changes but he is doing very well with it all and accepting everything with a lot of grace. Thankfully.

I have squeezed in a little bit of art - much of it a few minutes at a time on my lunch hours - sitting in the car - listening to a book on tape.

I started this little journal in January 2008 and this set of pages is the next to last ones in the book.  As you can see, I'm enamored of the Teesha Moore style of journaling right now so just had to try my hand at some pages.  I love the bright, funky colors and the sort of humorous and edgy way of depicting things, but most of all I love the use of pens for writing, lettering, drawing and doodling.  

A little Journaling

Wow - it's been quite a while since I posted anything.  Busy, busy.  Plus any art I've had time to do has pretty much been for an art group project we have going this year that is sort of secret for now.  More on that in a few months....

I did take some time recently to work on the last two pages in a little art journal - altered book that I'd started two years ago and never quite finished.  I really enjoy the style of journaling that Teesha Moore teaches so thought I'd give that a try on these pages. It really is a relaxing way of working - no planning ahead of time.  Just brushing on some acrylic paint for the background and when that's dry, adding some strips cut from various magazine pages to make the border.  Add a little shading with some of the newish Pan Pastels and a focal figure - made up of several different pictures from magazines.  I added a saying I'm fond of and a lot of doodling with my milky pens to add the finishing touches.  I really like the result and think I'll try another page or two or three...what do you think?

Doodle Bug Squirrel

Yes, I'm still squirrely! Kent State University's 100 year anniversary will be kicked off at homecoming on October 10 this year. For anyone who's been around the Kent, Ohio campus, you'll know that black squirrels are a beloved icon there. So we've mounted a squirrel decorating contest to help celebrate. There are two sizes of squirrels - 30" and 8". My contribution - "doodlebug squirrel" is one of the smaller size. It was doodled using a fine point enamel paint pen. I just had to get my ladybugs in there somehow. Can't wait to see the other entries! If you're in the area, be sure to stop by Tailgate Alley at the Dix Stadium from 1 pm - 5 pm on October 10 and vote for your favorite designs in each category!

Journaling (cont. 4)

Well these are some of my latest pages. Anyone who knows me knows I love the Wizard of Oz and now all the prequels to that story written by Gregory Maguire, like "Wicked", "Son of a Witch" and "A Lion Among Men". So of course, I had to have an "Oz" page in my journal. Elphaba, the Wicked Witch of the West is my favorite character....

The whole swine flu outbreak and the concern over it becoming a pandemic has had me really worried, so doing a spread on it helped me deal. The middle set of pages are a blatant plagarism (or is that only when it is the written word?) of a Zettiology artist/goddess - Teesha Moore, art work. I'm not intending to sell it or anything, so hopefully my "copying" won't be frowned upon. I really just admired her style and wanted to try my hand at it. I'm also NOT a fan of orange, so that seemed the perfect color for me to force myself to use. I really like how it turned out. Of course I had to do a bunch of doodling in the dresses and in the edge borders, but that is just me. Any chance to doodle.... Trying this taught me a number of different things and I love, love, love, her style of writing in her journal pages. So fun and interesting.

Sample Art

Here is a samples I did using some of the new rubber stamps from

Art Girl Designs. The stamps are deeply etched red rubber and come on sheets

that are 6" x 9" or there abouts.

Bandana Prints

These were a natural next step with the "doodling" I've been doing for
some time now. Saw the technique online at: PearlEsq a blog by Robin Beam, who is the
education director for Ranger Industries. I guess I'm behind the times because she has been doing this for some time now it appears! Oh well, better late than never! I've been having fun with this technique making backgrounds for cards, etc. and even did an envelope on a momentary whim last week. I love sending a little bit of art in the mail to perk up someone's day. Just wish I had more time for that! The technique in a shortened version is:

1. rub Distress Ink pads (or any dye ink pads) on a teflon sheet - don't overlap colors or they will muddy

2. spritz inked sheet with water - pretty heavily

3. drag a piece of watercolor paper through the wet dye once, then dab here and there into remaining wet dye to cover entire piece (easier to work with 1/4 sheets or so) of w/c paper

4. I found you can go back direct to paper with the ink pads adding a dab of ink here and there, then spritz the area with some more water to make it run and blend with the existing colors.

5. set aside to dry and do some more backgrounds

6. when background is dry (can speed with heat gun), stamp flourishes or any stamps you want to fill in a random pattern. Robin recommends the black acrylic paint dabber by Ranger. I tried it and preferred the Stazon black pad for clear, crisper images.

7. high light here and there alongside the stamped black images using a good, opaque, white pen. Here again, I prefer the Signo pen, but my friend Dawn let me try her new Extra fine white waterproof Sharpie marker and it is pretty great too!

8. I added some random dots here and there, but that is just me and I never know when to stop doodling!

Thanks Robin for another great technique!

Sally Jean Style

I seem to be in a "learn the styles of others" phase. We had a play night recently and a good friend showed us how to make the most wonderful "Sally Jean Alexander" style altered pages. What fun! I love the way these come out and think its a combination of subtle, toned down color on the page plus only black and white or sepia imagery. And then the thing that really pops it off the page is the use of charcoal pencils to outline the images and sort of grunge it up here and there. I did this piece first and since, have done a bunch of ATC's too - which I promptly traded away to my friends in the Art Gang Ohio group this last weekend!

Tribal Inspiration

Isn't it fun to get inspiration for something you love to do from the most unexpected places? I was recently looking at some lamp worked beads on line and came across some that are done using various aboriginal designs. No - I'm NOT going to try my hand at lampworking on top of everything else I can't seem to say no to! But the swirls and circles and undulating snake-like shapes really spoke to me so I just had to doodle with them. Here's my first attempt. This was done on white watercolor paper using the Faber Castell Pitt Artist pens in both the brush size and the S size for the tinier detail stuff. I think I'll have to play more with these sort of designs and I think I really want to try doing it on top of some of my hand dyed watercolor paper too.

Been Doodling Some More...

As you might know, I've been doodling for a year or more now and always on the lookout for more "patterns" to use. So when the "Zentangles" Web site became popular a couple months ago, I started playing with some of the shapes and patterns I found there.

I decided I needed (I'll admit to being a bit obsessive and detail-oriented!) a "library" of patterns I like to use repeatedly when doing my doodling in journals and ATC's etc. I did these little rounded-corner squares in my journal and thought you might enjoy seeing them too to give you some additional patterns to use as you do your own doodling.

Those Zentangle people are right - doodling is so relaxing and "zen" like. I lose all track of time when doing these repetitive, mindless patterns.

I've also been experimenting with a variety of pens to see what I like best. My favorite is the Pentel EnerGel liquid gel ink pen with a very fine needle tip. But alas, it isn't permanent, so when I want to have permanency for either archival purposes or because I'm going to add color over the patterns I've drawn, I have to use something with waterproof ink.

My favorite in the permanent category is the Staedtler .01 Permanent pen. It actually comes in some other sizes too finer and broader both if you want a variety. These are a little pricey though and for me not terribly easy to find.

And a friend, Colleen, who works for Faber Castell here in Ohio, gave me some of their permanent ink pens to try. The Pitt Artist pen by Faber Castell is the nicest in my opinion. Good permanent, black India ink in an "S" size works well for these doodles, but was a tiny bit too broad for me because I tend to have a heavy hand and they are felt tipped so they sort of smoosh out a bit and get even broader than designed.

But, good news!, Colleen recently told me that they have a brand new pen coming out very soon and it is available in an even finer tip! She let me write with her one and only sample and it will be a great substitute for the harder to find and more expensive Staedtler pen. Can't wait till they're on the market!

Doodle, doodles, everywhere!

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Are you sick of seeing my doodles yet? Too bad! Because I'm having way too much fun with these! My close friends know that I love Halloween, hence the witch ATC! And along with that goes a love of the "Wizard of Oz" and now the "Wicked" series. These book pages are a great place to house some of the great quotes I've been collecting on scraps of paper for years. The black spread here started with the quote, then sort of evolved into an Oz spread. I hadn't intended it to have any color at all, but when I thought I was finished, I just had to add the red glitter to Dorothy's shoes! And I'm not a big fan of glitter, but how else do you get ruby slippers to sparkle?!

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Oh - I should tell you about the pens I've been using so far...I'm in love with this gel pen made by Pentel, called EnerGel. It goes on so smoothly and is a dream to even just write with. But alas, it isn't waterproof so when I'm going to add color over top of it, I have to resort to the more expensive but waterproof, Staedtler or Micron pens. I do like the really fine lines I get with these pens though. The Pentel is a .5 mm pen, while the other two come in a variety of sizes and I like the .01 the best. Really, really tiny lines and doodles are possible with them!

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Then of course, I had to do more bugs! I hope you can see these close up to see all the little doodling going on inside the bug shapes.

A fellow artist and new friend, Colleen McGinty, works for Faber-Castell and she kindly sent me a couple sets of their markers to try for my doodling, so they will be used for my next doodles. I'll let you know how they work! Right after I get done soldering some new pins I have in progress...are you starting to see why I called this blog "Art Frenzy"? LOL!

Doodle ATC's

Here are some of the ATC's I've been doing in spare moments. I do these in the car at lunchtime while listening to books on my MP3 player. I even keep a few blank ATC sized cards next to the phone at work for those times when I'm on perpetual hold! Now my boss won't have to wade through my doodles on the sides of all the invoices we pay! The eyes may look a bit odd and truly are not my normal thing to draw, but I saw another artist drawing eyes and thought what a good way to build your skill at drawing parts of the body...and DOODLING at the same time! The colored ATC's here were done with more of the ColorBox Cat's Eye pigment ink pads. I did find though that if I put the colored ink on last, it sort of greys out the nice black gel pens I'm using. And if you put it on the card first, you have to give it a few days to dry really, really well, or the gel pens don't want to write over it.

Doodling.....

Oh boy - don't read this if you don't want to become addicted to doodling like I have! If you love details this will be right up your alley! One of my friends, Lou McCulloch shared her book "The Humument" with our club some time ago. I fell in love with this book and all the lovely "doodling" that the author, Tom Phillips did over top of the pages of an old Victorian novel ("The Human Element"). I was inspired to try my own hand at "found text" and "found poetry" - obliterating most of what was on the pages originally and only leaving some (or sometimes none) of the original text while adding my own art on top and around it. I enjoyed playing with trying to make a free-form poem out of the original text, but for me, the big draw to this genre of art, is the doodling. I feel that I am primarily a left brained, organized, toe-the-line sort of person. I work with numbers and facts all day in my job and that organizational bent of mine follows me into my personal life as well. When I'm doing any sort of art, I feel like the right brained part of me kicks in goes to war with my left brained, tightly organized self, trying to burst free of the "rules" I impose on myself. This doodle art, as I've come to call it, allows both parts of me to meld nicely and feel right at home! And the tiny little patterns I draw on the pages is very relaxing and stress-free and sort of....well....mindless! I'm definitely addicted to this and have even taken to carrying ATC sized cardstock in my purse to "doodle" on. I'll post some of those here too for you to see. Hope you're inspired to give this a try too!