Tuesday, September 14, 2010

Easy Journal Pages

I had a little time to play in my Moleskine journal while I was in the mountains last weekend.  The first pages used a wax paper resist technique from Diana Trout's DVD, Playful Paper Backgrounds.  You just place wax paper over the paper, write with a pointed object like a ball point pen, and then paint over it.  In this picture, the leaf garland and a few flowers at the bottom are the wax paper imprints.  I painted with watercolors. (Blogger is insisting on rotating this picture 90 degrees, despite all my efforts!)


I like to paint backgrounds ahead of time, and then add collage papers and text to my journal pages.  On this spread, I used the painted pages that looked like a colorful bra, and journaled about our trip on the Blue Ridge Parkway last weekend to the Northwest Trading Post.  All I had to do was pick up some brochures at the trading post for my collage elements.  I like the way the mountain photo on the right merged into my painted background!


I did the same thing to create a page about West Jefferson, the beautiful town where we do all of our shopping when we are in the mountains.  The border is from Violette Clark's book Journal Bliss.  I colored it in with watercolor pencils.


And here are the next painted pages, ready for some artwork or collage and text.  I have a portable set of watercolors that I keep in my travel bag.



I don't worry about doing the pages in order, just choose a background that suits what I want to work on.  Painting them ahead of time means no waiting for paint to dry when you are ready to write!  There is a series of three articles  by Dawn Sokol about working on journal pages in three stages in the last three issues of Cloth, Paper, Scissors.  I agree that the paint, collage, text method is very do-able!

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