the barely there

book

the little muslin book from last week's post... i said it was going to be my new 'wandering journal'. HA! i've hardly been able to pull myself away from it! six pieces of muslin, no paper - it's barely there...


i used oil pastels,


and a china marker.


i stitched...




painted with watercolors


and loved it when they bled through to the back side of the page.


colored pencil, watercolor paint, and a little plaster on the tree trunk.


i glued...


the black lines are from a china marker, smudged around. i discovered that you can use oil pastels with stencils. that's the stencil i used under the book -- i just filled in most of each diamond with oil pastels


then used tortillons to smudge it around until it totally filled in each spot. i used the totillons a lot to blend and smush the oil pastels into the muslin. the muslin gets wonderfully soft when you do this.


yep, i've already started another one! this one has 11 pages, which just about maxes out my sewing machine...

i've had some questions about what i do to the muslin, so in a couple of days i'll put up step-by-step directions for my non-picky, very unparticular process. i'm putting it in a separate post so i can put a link to it in the sidebar under 'tutorials'. thank you everyone for your kind words about these muslin pages!


this is the first time in my entire 50+ years that i've had a cactus that's actually *grown*. wow! that really impresses me...

danny gregory, 'the creative license'

this week's art wisdom comes from danny gregory in one of my favorite journaling books, 'the creative license'.

How many ways can you draw shadows, reflections, textures, and midtones?

Experiment with cross-hatching -- vertical, horizontal, thick, thin, overlaid, intersecting, parallel.

Stipple with dots, squares, dotted lines, hash marks.

Try drawing more details in the shadowed areas and leaving the highlights as plain paper.

XO