Finishing my yellow accordian journal

Last post I shared two small accordian journals made from file folders, a creation inspired by the website DaisyYellow.com (fun stuff there for art journals). Since then, I have modified three of the five creations on my yellow jouran, and added a few more on the back side of it. The yellow art journal is now finished, and I even found a way to incorporate it into my larger art journal.

Here's what I did.

I added a citron wash to the citron forest. I added a lemon wash to the yellow flip-flops, but then I cut some flip-flops from yellow pattern paper and glued them on my poorly drawn ones. I added vermillion wash to the red and orange record album logo. I added the washes with water color pencils and a water brush. I also added a little peach-colored paint to the peach-colored pattern paper with the Willy Wonka theme.

DaisyYellow.com's Fun Color Prompt Challenge for week two was colors sepia, lavender, tangerine charcoal and sky, and things house, wave or surf, torn paper, tulip and color wheel. I took more liberties with the challenge this week. I hope they will forgive me.

I started with a photo of surf, and a hint of sky. I added a little more sky blue into the water, which was initially an attempt to write "somewhere" on the page like I did on  a photo of this same beach in my regular art journal. I also doodled blue waves around the photo, similar to what I had done in the art journal.

Next, since the technique produces the desired color, I turned to the technique of tinting a photo sepia on a computer. The photo is of me, standing behind my house. Mine is the one with the bushes. When a photo of tulips showed up on Facebook, I knew it had to be in there too. I also knew I was going to use one of my many quotes, and I was going to "burn" the edges of it by adding black and brown ink. (Charcoal the edges by adding mostly black?)

But how was I going to incorporate the lavender and tangerine color prompts, and the torn paper and color wheel thing prompts? Then it dawned on me. Use the color wheel tool to help develop the color scheme, and use the decades-old technique of tearing pieces of paper on the page to add texture.

That really only worked on the sepia photo, and perhaps to a lesser extent, the tulips. See, if I had to do the color wheel to pick colors to match the beach photo, I would have had to have picked red. And that just didn't work.

But in between sepia and lemon yellow (the journal's color on the color scale, you have orange (tangerine) and yellow orange. A few scraps of cardstock to accent the sepia photo, and one striped scrap to accent the charcoaled quote fit the bill.

That left lavender to accent the tulips photo. Fine. It had four of the next five colors on the color wheel, with red and pink representing two shades of the same color.

That left me with only four prompts. Once I had the message explaining the liberties I had taken (instead of Tammy's Fun Color Prompt Challenge, mine was the Color, Technique and Tool Prompt Challenge) I still had  one leftover spaces. But that worked well for me.

I used the blank space to glue the small yellow art journal to the main art journal.

Since there are only four prompts on the back side, nothing is covered up. I still have room to do more to the page if I so choose.

Some artwork from the Art Journal Tangents and the Fun Color Challenge

As I said in my previous blog post, one of my largest inspirations in my art journal is Daisy Yellow. 

In August, Tammy had another month of inspirations, by posting weekly her Art Journal Tangents some creative things we could do with art and paper. One of the weeks, she cut up file folders and folded them to make accordian books. She then had 12 small surfaces on which to put something artistic. In no time at all, she and many of her creative followers did exactly that.

I struggled though. What, in my mountain of supplies would look good on this? And since one of my possessions is the remnants of a package of multi-colored file folders, which color should I even get started with?

Then I saw a picture on Facebook. This was of another long-ago Olympic torch bearer. Not quite as long ago as the one I'd seen in the magazine, only from 1960. But that's still a long time ago, longer ago than my lifetime, and I'm a Grandma. The other neat thing about the torchbearer from 1960 is he was from my hometown, and probably went to high school with my mother as he was only a year behind her in school.

So, I had to do something with that picture. I printed it out and put it in my art journal, hoping to figure out what. I also already had found some scraps of inked paper with windows punched in them, and thought I should put them in the art journal too.

The inked paper with the windows reminded me of Prompt 2, and the Olympic torchbearer reminded me of Prompt 9 on Daisy Yellow. What's more, they both also reminded me of the color red because my high school has that not too politically correct mascot shared with Washington DC's football team,, the Redskins. And that, along with Tammy's Art Journal Tangent, inspired this art creation. I am still trying to figure out what to put on the very last page, but I've found a few more red things to put on there recently.

September, Daisy Yellow has a new weekly challenge. It's called the Fun Color Prompt Challenge, and requires that we use one color and one word to create small pieces of art that would fit in the accordian books she taught us how to make last month.  So I came up with this.

The color choices we had to work with were in the first week were grapefruit, peach, vermillion, citron and lemon. The prompts, from which we were to choose five, were forest, mysterious, flip -flops, album cover, doodle and Willy Wonka.

I chose to discard the mysterious prompt, because nothing came to mind. But here's my take on the rest.

1. I stamped a citrus forest with the first tree stamp I could find.

2. I attempted to draw lemon yellow flip flops on a pink background as I had seen in the Sandals logo my church was using all summer. (They went to a new logo this week in preparation for a new sermon series this weekend). In the logo, you can clearly see two yellow flip-flops resting heel to heel to form an S. My second artwork is my best attempt of four at recreating this.

3. I drew a textual element from one of Don's album covers. Vermillion is red-orange, but I didn't have anything that color, so I used red and orange. The text reads "Incense and Peppermints, Strawberry Alarm Clock."

4. A pink (same pink as in Prompt 2) doodle. This one is significant because when I was recently meeting with some other women business owners, most of whom are still in the startup stage ( at least 16 months behind me), I used a similar doodle to explain to them that you do not start a business and become successful on a straight path, but rather you have some success, make a few wrong turns, fall back and then rise above that, over and over again. 

5. A lollipop on a peach-pattern paper background. I knew I was going to cut out pieces of candy from a collection of paper called "Sweet" for the Willy Wonka prompt. I ended up cutting a lollipop right off the cover. I thought I was going to paint the background with my only paint color, which is paint. But working on this last piece of artwork last night, it was late. I did not want to break out the paints and wait for them to dry. I remembered another collection, I don't think it even has a name, had the peach-colored paper in it. I think the design looks kind of like Oompa Loompas too. 

Some artwork from Daily Paper Prompts

My favorite place to find prompts for my art journal is DaisyYellow.com The owner of this site, Tammy Garcia, is a talented and inspiring artist. She's had plenty of inspiration on her site lately.

The Daily Paper Prompts

Technically, these ran July 1 through Aug. 31, but you can start and finish these anytime. I'm still working on mine,

Technically, you are supposed to use one prompt for each page. I've got a few of those. I will post at least one of those another day. But, not all of mine are one prompt per page.

On these two pages, I incorporated prompts 2 through 12. For the most part, I used my watercolor pencils, which can create very interesting subtle effects when you apply water to them. Some of these prompts I took rather loosely, but the prompts were:

2. Windows: Cut holes into paper and let other paper show through the window. I cut a logo out of some scratch paper, and then used it to color the yellow square shown here on the top page.

3. Drips: Very subtle here, but at the bottom of the top page you can see that my watercolor pencils were applied with enough water to make them drip.

4. Flowers. I drew them in the top right side of this page for the prompt, and leaves on the bottom of the right side. I later drew more flowers on the second page.

5. Linear: I drew four very straight lines on the top page. I used the same scratch paper from Prompt 2.

6, Certificate - That left a great box to certify something, especially with the "gold medal" from Prompt 2 already on it. I certified the page was already a complete mess, but I wasn't done yet.

7. Leftovers -  It's hard to see on the blog, but a portion of the now very colorfully-edged scratch paper is glued to the bottom of the top page.

8. Faded -  Cut paper into four pieces. Put some color on each piee and do something to make it look faded. I drew more flowers with the watercolor pencils and applied the water brush to these. Since I was running out of room on the top page, I glued these to the facing (bottom) page.

9. Game - This prompt is key to another project I'll post after this one, which then inspired yet another project. But for this page, I found a picture of 1936 Olympic torchbearers in a magazine, and decided the Olympics were the perfect game to represent this prompt.

10. Stitch paper - This is perhaps the most loosely interpreted prompt, because I don't have thread for stitching on hand. So I perforated the torn edges of my photo with a needle anyhow, then glued some fiber to the other page.

11. Ogee Pattern - This is my second year going through this same list of prompts with Daisy Yellow, and the first set of creations from them are in the same journal. I went all out with a few ogee patterned pages in 2013, but this prompt never has been my favorite. So, I drew one row of ogee pattern at the top of this multi-prompt spread. Later, I added a border sticker that I thought looked a little like a small scale version of it.

12. Use a circle sticker - The blue one with the crown

 And that was enough, I think. I moved on to new pages for each prompt I've done since then. But I didn't completely leave these prompts alone.