hand book, etc.

oil pastel, watercolors, colored pencil, gouache and casein paint in pocket hand book

i finished my pocket moleskine a couple of weeks ago, and have been working in a pocket sized hand book since. i went to buy another moleskine, but saw that they have a prop 65 label on them because the covers have a known carcinogen in them. good grief! i love moleskine sketchbooks but i feel a responsibility to support businesses that aren't using stuff that harms people and the environment, so i bought a 3 1/2" x 5" hand book instead.


this is what it looks like - very much like a pocket moleskine except with a cloth cover. the paper has more tooth that the sketchbook paper - no comparison there. i like it for watercolors and colored pencil, but wish that the pages were a little thicker. paint doesn't run through to the other side, but you can see where dark colors are on the other side of the page.

colored pencil in hand book journal

watercolor, colored pencil, and gouache in pocket hand book

because the sun is so low and it's often cloudy, it's not easy to take photographs that actually look like the original. sigh... especially of images like these, which are barely there to begin with.

watercolor, colored pencil, gouache and casein paint in pocket hand book

i put a layer of white casein paint down on this page first. love doing that...

watercolor, colored pencil and gouache in pocket hand book

watercolor, gouache, and casein paint in pocket hand book

most spreads are something like this - a mix of pogo prints and paintings. the page on the left has a layer of casein paint laid down first, and then i painted on that.


the little table to the right of my art table used to be covered with containers of acrylic paint; i've put those away because i'm not using them now - i feel like i can get the opaque color that i want with gouache and casein paint. this makes me happy!

tom ~ oil pastel, watercolors, gouache, and casein paint on old book page

tom was painted on black casein paint - his skin is oil pastel, and i added some watercolor and white gouache on top of that, but if you click you can see brush marks left behind on the casein paint. as a ground, i can't say enough about white and black (or any color!) shiva casein paint.

here's a link to a page by john molnar, who painted with shiva casein paint. there's a video too that's not especially informative about casein paint, but it does show his casein paintings.

a couple of other things...

this is the week that michaels has the 40% off coupon for your total art supply purchase... if you don't get their coupons, you can go to their website to sign up. the coupon applies to everything in the art section - the one with paints, pencils, pastels, etc. in it.

anne bagby now has a blog! she just put up a video about printing stripes with acrylic paint. and she's been talking about working on yupo - sharing her discoveries. i'm a tremendous admirer of anne's work and would read what she writes/watch what she does no matter what medium she's working in...

* * *

mlk arriving home after receiving the nobel peace prize in 1964. via tumblr

"I know that love is ultimately the only answer to mankind’s problems. And I’m going to talk about it everywhere I go."

~Martin Luther King

XO