New Art in the New Year

Happy New Year!
For the first time in a year I will be working in two journals at once, one where I will primarily draw and paint and one where I will be experimenting and trying some new stuff. The image above is from the new journal (see previous post about altering a purchased journal). Not much of an experiment, a drawing with watercolor and some Chartpak marker transfers. I am still up in the air on whether or not I think this page is complete. I do not like the words I added, so I am contemplating adding some collage paper over the text. I am also not working in this journal in order, because of the alterations, I have different sized pages to choose from so I am going to be jumping around a bit to fit what I need onto the page that will work best.

As a part of the Strathmore Visual Journal workshop, I am exploring reusing and recycling art from previous journals and other personal art and ephemera as collaged journal pages. I have to say I struggled a little with the idea of reusing art to make a new page in my journal. I usually work to come up with new drawings in my sketchbook/journal, not copying and reusing work that I already have finished. After digging around in my studio, I decided this was the perfect use for some of the many examples I create in my classroom, that are finished but never really feel like "art" because they get made while I talk to students and explain the process.

Working on a page spread that was prepainted with liquid acrylics and that had a foldout on the right hand side, I added some graph paper and paste paper scraps that I ripped and glued down with matte medium. I then used the background from a photocopied drawing that was an example from my drawing class. The background from the drawing was a solid mass of doodles and line pattern, so I cut it up into small rectangles and squares to glue down. I glued a few elements on the closed page too, even though it will be the next page and I will probably draw something different there, I felt like it should flow when the flap was shut.

The face drawing on the inside of the foldout is the subject matter of the drawing I copied and cut apart for the background designs. It just happened to fit well on the page, so I went with it. The image below is my first completed recycled art collage for the visual journal workshop. I think we are going to continue to work with the collage we create this week, so I intend to make at least one, hopefully two, more to work with, especially since this feels done to me now.

So far so good on my personal challenge to draw or create art of my own every day this year.