Art journal videos call journal entries "pages" since each one is like a little work of art. In my Imperfect Journal method, my writings fall somewhere between a diary entry and an art journal "page" and I don't think of them as works of art. To me they are processing aids or playgrounds or mini-inspirations to keep on going everyday -- relaxing and remembering to be grateful on the hard days or when battling the blues and records of joy and the pleasures of every day life on the good days.
However you think of your pages, your background is the place to start. Once I begin "messing" up a page, I may find myself ready to get the pen out and write or I may want to add layers and make it more about the colors and images than writing things down. Usually I prepare some backgrounds in advance so I can quickly sit down and scrawl if I feel like it. For a while in the beginning as I got started I gessoed a double page every night so they could dry as I slept and there were always a few prepped pages ready to play.
Here are seven quick background ideas. Some work with and and some without. If you have regular pages in a journal like my favorite Leuchtturm, you will want to gesso a lot of the pages, but if you have a watercolor or mixed media book, it isn't always needed. Even if using a mixed media book with tough pages, I recommend adding gesso to some pages, just to enjoy the way the colors bloom and move around easily; the surface gives you more time to play before staining the pages. The cloudy, pale blossom on the pages helps to start making them your own and makes a sensuous ground that adds to the pleasure of playing with color and texture.
Try a few of these idea to get started creating vibrant, loose, easy backgrounds. All these methods are super easy. Materials I recommend include: gesso and matte gel medium, pan pastels in rose, turquoise, and yellow, a few Gelatos or gel crayons, any chalkboard acrylic paint, and/or any spray ink--and, of course, unscented wet wipes!
1. Pan Pastel Clouds -- with or without gesso, rub a soft make-up sponge over the pan pastel pot. In this case fingers don't work since the oils in your fingers will absorb rather than pick up the pigment. You need a dry little sponge -- these come with the pastels but you can get more at the dollar store in the make-up aisle. Rub the dry pigment across your page, circling and blending until you have lovely cloud of color. Use one color on the top of the page and another on the bottom if you wish and blend the middle into a delicious halftone. Or cover the whole page in one juicy tint. Voila! This surface is ready to write on without any more prep. It will be easy to add in stencils using a contrasting color of pan pastel or by wiping away pigment with your damp baby wipe.
As long as we don't use much moisture on this page, it works fine without gesso. The quickest way to get a little pop!
2. Gel Crayon Stain--On a gessoed surface or mixed media paper scribble the color of the day here and there randomly across the page. Quickly take a fresh and damp wipe and blend -- some types, such as Gelatos or gel sticks, will almost wipe away and you'll need to add more pigment to get more color. Others, like Faber Castell brights or distress crayons will leave a nice stain right away. Each brand is a little different, so experiment -- there is no right or wrong--we just want to get some color on the page to inspire our writing or to start layering. Holtz Distress crayons will set very quickly and you'll be able to see the crayon-like marks, which is also fun.
Here is a page of 180 media paper gessoed and wiped with turquoise, goldenrod and rose Gelatos.
You can also apply pigment directly to the wet wipe and apply for a smoother look and to get more color right where you want it. See? You are already having opinions -- that is your style emerging!
3. Partitioning--(as an artistic rather than a political exercise! --oops, that's the historian in me!)....Draw in pencil on a page with or without gesso. Divide the page into six parts by lightly sketching in six rough boxes, creating a grid or just dividing the page with lines. Color your simple boxes in with Gelatos. Give it a gentle water mist with your spray bottle or blend with damps wipes to activate the color.
You can also use watercolor paints for this. Slap an intense splash of color into each square. All the same color? Different colors? What do you choose? If you use watercolors, use plenty of water and relish the loose, vibrant pooling. Let them move around in your box -- it will look even better if you don't stay within the lines and let the colors splash into life. Into the wet area add more of the same pigment and watch it bloom and billow.
Do the same in each box. Allow to dry or use the hairdryer to speed it up. Once dry, you can either outline the boxes with loose circles or leave them as they are.
4. Tissue paper--first, while your fingers aren't sticky (okay, lets face it--my fingers usually are) tear a piece of old tissue paper from last christmas, in a size somewhat like your page. On a page without gesso, use your fingers or a brush (brush is less messy, but like I said mine are usually sticky) spread a layer of gel medium quickly over the paper. Place your tissue across the page and smooth it down, using more gel medium on top if it seems dry or not sticking. Let it wrinkle and tear. Patch here and there if you wish. Use a second color if you have extra or add in anything else you might want to glue on like a ticket stub, receipt or a piece of pretty napkin. Artist tip: Let a few pieces run off the page and glue down the extra on the other side of the page -- as if a little of today's color is spilling over into tomorrow. As soon as it is dry, you are ready to write or begin a collage or have a background for a mixed media experiment.
Regular pink tissue paper applied with gel medium.
If you are lucky, your tissue will bleed its color and create lovely little rivers of pigment. I order special bleeding tissue to get this effect, but be careful of staining!
5. Magazine pages--any magazine or trash from your junk mail will work. Even newspaper. Try the same technique as above only with torn pieces of pages or flyers. You can throw anything down, or choose colors, photos or phrases you like. When done, even while still damp, mute the aggressive tones with a thin layer of gesso or white or light colored acrylic paint. Suddenly that trash has become ephemera--you two for one pizza ad or sports scores fading into a dreamy background for words, memories, photos, or drawings.
Detail -- insurance bill. Do I have questions about my health?
A fragment of a bill, billing envelope, with magazine and catalogue scraps covered with white chalkboard acrylic, which is easy to write on. I love the texture and smeared it on with my fingers -- imperfectly!
When I do this, I often thing of my mother's newspapers and advertisements, or my grandmother's, or my great-grandmother's--news of the war in the pacific, advertisements for those new panty hose, seed packets or soap wrappers. Unimportant and annoying garbage at the time, but little mirrors into our days.
A few ads from the 1930's newspaper my great-grandmother took.
6. A stencil makes one of my favorite backgrounds. I thought I'd like the more complex ones with trees or birds and butterflies, but my favorites are simple geometric shapes, wallpaper paisleys, or basic flowers and dots. This is pretty on either a page with gesso or without, but on a gessoed page you can remove color as well as add it! Lay your stencil across the page -- since this is the imperfect journal and our stencils always slip, we don't even have to affix it with a piece of masking tape. Getting it as flat as you can, wrap a damp wipe around your finger and rub a good coat of Gelato onto the end. gently wipe your color through the stencil, rubbing gently or dabbing. Too wet and some will seep through and puddle a little, but it still looks pretty. Renew the color and add it everywhere or just here and there so the color fades away. Artists Tip: be sure some parts of the stencil pattern run off the page--you'll be surprised how this adds dimension and life to the pattern!
A few stencils combined on a gessoed page. I can write across it, up, down, or sideways or add collage pieces later. These were don'e with gel crayons on a wet wipe -- the bronze was leftover on a used wipe but have life left in it!
Alternatively -- on a gessoed page rub Gel crayon on your damp wipe and stain the page. Lay down the stencil and use a clean are of the wipe to gently remove color, for an inverted pattern.
Try doing both on the same page! This will dry quickly, but you can speed it up with a hair dryer.
7. The fastest of all -- ink spray! You can buy gorgeous ink sprays or make your own. My favorites are Diane Reavely's Dylusions Collection, because they never clog and the colors are glorious and brilliant. A little goes a long way, though and they can leave through even a gessoed page -- so use this to your imperfect advantage. You can put a sheet of waxed paper under your page to prevent bleed-through, but I kind of love the way intensity seeps into the empty pages ahead--to me it is like the mood of an especially sunny day that seems to pervade three or four days to come. Or even like the sadness of a blue mood that stains a whole week. The color range of our days is so vast and all the shade word together to make art of our lives.
Here I am sharing with a you a page that I hated and was going to gesso over. I was tired and nothing worked out right -- but when I added the intense rusty red spray ink and it began to bleed -- I decided to keep it. It was one of those days and I made my mark.
On a plain or gessoed page spray a little mist of color. That may be enough! Or let it pool and drip and help the drips find their way back and forth across and down the page by tilting the journal. Blot if you wish. Mop if you wish. Spray with clear water and watch the color shift and glow. Artist's Tip: Make your own spray colors by buying (or rescuing) little spray bottles (usually a couple dollars for three at craft stores or superstores.) Fill the bottle with water and a drop of india ink, watercolor, liquid acrylics, or shavings from your gel sticks. Any water soluble dye or ink works and you can use the intense inks in a watered down form for more pastel effects.
spray inks in green and yellow AND purple over a collage and a whirl wind stencil. This was a discard torn cover of an old Dulac fairy tale book...
I can't get enough of the soft colors and random effects of spray inks and I confess that I want them all. When I have a page that I am not happy with, often a big spray of white ink or a bold distress ink just randomizes and unites the whole page in a way that delights me.
So those are seven easy ways to create a page background. Sometime I create a page this way and I like the blank pages so much -- I just leave it blank! Or add a few stamps and love it the way it is. It made me feel good to mess the page up. I made a mark! Sometimes making a mark is all that it takes to give a creative person that mysterious feeling of -- art. If you feel like writing on your page, hurrah! If you feel like obscuring what you wrote with a cloud of gesso or a spray of scarlet ink--that's fine to. You came to play.
So go out and make a mark!