Category Archives: 52 Play Dates Challenge

Doodled Printed Napkin Journal Art

Doodled Printed Napkin Journal Art

I love working with printed napkins and tissue paper, dont you? Jan’s 52 Play Dates challenge for last week was to use tissue paper to create a doodled piece of art, so I just had to give it a whirl.

I started out by gluing random pieces of printed napkins and tissue paper with watered down pva glue onto card stock and leaving them to air dry naturally – that was the hardest part for me as I wanted to use them straight away!!

Once they were dry I painted over them using a light wash of watercolour and gouache paints and let that dry out, finally I added detail to them using coloured markers and a black and white pen for outlining.

Heres a couple of my finished pieces below, I havent finished them all yet. You can see the before and after photos to give you an idea of what they looked like before I destroyed them using my paints and pens :)

Before Paint:

After Paint:

Before Paint: 

After Paint:

Before Paint:

After Paint:

Before Paint:

After Paint:

Before Paint:

After Paint:

Before Paint:

After Paint:

Journal Pages Using Gesso And Pastel Backgrounds

Journal Pages Using Gesso And Pastel Backgrounds

I decided to add some more detail to yesterdays journal page as it didnt feel complete.

I also started work on 2 more journal pages which you can see below, if you click on the thumbnails you will see them larger.

I created the backgrounds on all 3 journal pages using a blend of soft pastels and gesso with the magazine images; its a cool technique I picked up from Jan’s 52 Play Dates Blog.

The girl with pink hair on the January 2012 page was completely covered with gesso and I used both inktense and promarkers to add detail to her face, I did the same thing with the daisy image. Im rubbish at drawing faces and trying to make them look natural, so for this image I didnt even try to make her look realistic :)

Im unsure if these are finished yet, my muse will tell me if I need to do anything to them next, but for now Im leaving them be…

2012 January Wish List Journal Page

2012 January Wish List Journal Page

I was inspired to break out my soft pastels after watching the technique combining pastels, gesso and magazine papers featured in week one of 52 Play Dates.

To begin with I tore out a face image and the words ‘wish list’ from a magazine and glued them down. Then I added a border of printed flowers I found in a magazine and tore 2 long strips to make a border on the page. Next I added a layer of pink and magenta soft pastels and rubbed them them with my fingers to blend, then sprayed on pastel fixative to set the colour. Next using white gesso sparingly I rubbed it all over the page until I was happy with how it looked and left it to dry.

For the next part I took inspiration from Effy Wild’s Book Of Days January Page, she used a picture of herself and using scraps of paper made her photograph look like a little funky disjointed person.

My printer and computer arent on talking terms at the moment so I didnt have a picture to print out of myself, so I used the face picture I had already glued onto my pastel & gesso background as my starting point and glued on body shapes, a crown, hair and wings all taken from scrapbook and magazine papers.

For the next steps I coloured in the magazine paper hair, face and flowers using my pro-marker pens, I also added a heart to the paper body and a mini crown within the larger crown and outlined all the images across the entire page using silver and black markers until I was happy with how it looked.

I highlighted the ‘wish list’ words using a silver pen and doodled on the date 2012 above it, then I got to thinking about what my wish list for 2012 was and dug around in my paper scraps and found 2 words in the stash which were perfect and glued them on.

The words I picked out are: Inspiration and Well Being, they are essentially my top 2 wishes for 2012, while Im not gonna get better, I would like a sense of better well being in 2012 and some pain relief, and most importantly I wish for inspiration – without that I cant create :)

Anyways heres my page, I hope you like it :)