Playing with Multi Media

I pulled out an old book of mine on creating artists journals in multi media and just had fun for a whole afternoon reading and paging through the wonderful ideas.

(The nice thing about being old is you forget what you have read and so you get to re-discover it all over again! Hahaha).

The author is Lynne Perrella.

I got to thinking about designing a journal cover on some sort of fabric (WAY WAY out of the box for me.)

I had some left over watercolor canvas from a previous project and so I designed a journal cover for my daughter, Julie (who likes to keep journals).

It is planned for a 9 x 9 inch journal but I haven't actually cut the canvas to that size yet. I had some fun with transferring a photo image to the canvas which came out sort of in "ghostly" way but interesting with the texture. It is a photo of Julie and of me and I am really ghostly in the background and she is recognizable. I like the idea that I may be some influence in her life but am in the background.

I coated the canvas lightly with acrylic polymer medium and then lay a inkjet black and white face down on it and using a credit card I firmly drew the card over the back of the inkjet several time and then peeled it up carefully. Black and white seems to work better . I sprayed the image lightly with acrylic varnish and let dry.

Then I just played around with ribbon, fluid acrylic, watercolor, ink, stamps etc and thinking of her and the things she loves like nature, plants, labyrinths, drawing, etc.

I plan to coat everything with the polymer medium at the end for durability. I am thinking that at a later date, I will use a spray-on glue to attach it to the front of the journal and then lay it under some heavy books overnight.