More Experiments and a Very Tall Lady in "Jots and Tittles"

 I'm still playing/experimenting in the Jots and Tittles handmade journal. This is what I've done since my last post.

I worked on this one, off and on, for a few days. She was loosely inspired by Kate Morgan's gorgeous canvas pieces. It's a double spread, and the skirt is much longer than I realized when I cut it and glued it down. It's cut from tissue paper, then I sketched her torso, head, etc. The background is a couple of layers of watercolor, and I sketched the tree in ink. The goat is "Cooter", and was one of our pets years ago. I printed off a photo of him, cut it out, and glued him down. The collar and hat are cut from the scrap tissue paper and collaged on. She was so much fun to do! 6" x 18"

Same piece, but I used a negative filter on the photo in editing. I like it a lot!

Another double spread where I cleaned off part of my palette. The paint was already thin, and I added more water, which made it too light for my taste, but I planned to come back to it when it tells me what else it needs.

The same double spread as above, but yesterday I found a piece of paper that I had wiped the paint off my brush on at different times and saw an image in it. The colors looked good, to me, so I glued the paper down on the background. I still like it, but I may do something else to the background at some point.

Another page where I cleaned off my palette with very watered down watercolor paint, also planning to add more at a later time.

This is the other side of the folded paper (from above) where I had wiped the paint off my brush at various times. I pulled out a couple of images on it, and the colors matched, so I glued it down on the page. I like it too.

Another palette clean-off page, just going where the brush took me. It looks a bit Asian to me. It's wonky, but I love it!

One more page of cleaning off my watercolor palette, and I do love the looseness of it. After a couple of days, I added the stems and leaves with a posca pen and a colored pencil.

I got out my gouache paint for this double spread and, based on the watercolor one above, used a large flat brush to recreate it. I used the paint straight out of the tube, and it's not showing up, but I used a blue posca pen to put dots at the ends of all the yellow lines. When I find my stencil with Asian words, I'm going to add one Sanskrit word to it.

 

Here, I was just doodling with a small marker and my imagination.

This one started off with a very large black Posca paint pen and a loose sketch, loosely inspired by Helen Wells. A couple of days later I got the bright idea to color it in with my Posca paint pens. WAY too bright! I thought it needed something translucent over it to tone it down. I couldn't think of anything, so I painted over it with white Kuretake watercolor, which changed it a lot. I had to redo some of the black lines after the watercolor dried, but I really kind of like it now. 

Another background page where I cleaned my palette off. I had a sheet of tea stained rice paper, so I folded it in two, cut some bottles in various shapes, and glued them to the page, then added some pen lines and a bit of watercolor. The logos are stickers off some shower steamer discs that I was gifted.

These vases are just some imaginary one-line vases and jars that I doodled, just to keep in practice. Fun stuff!

I did another page of sketches this morning, but had company and didn't get them scanned yet, so they'll show up in the next post probably. Hopefully, with more pages!

I have been very tempted to do the 100 Day Project, the 100 Stitch Meditations Challenge, and this year's Sketchbook Revival again, but, so far, I've resisted the temptation. They were a lot of fun last year, and I grew a lot creatively, but it was very challenging to do them all at the same time. So, we'll see!

We're still trying to clean up our yards from the big ice storm. So many trees and limbs down! We had to call the phone company to come unhook the phone line so we could get two big limbs off of it, and we're going to have to call someone to come cut a huge tree limb off my mom's house, which is still attached to the tree trunk, but barely. We barely have any trees left in our yard now. It's sad to see the trees, especially my favorite big cedar, ravaged by Mother Nature, but time changes everything...

Anyway, that's it for this post! Hope to see you in the next one!