Wanderlust: face to the sun

This is the second week of the “Faces” theme and the first of this theme’s guest instructors: Marjie Kemper (website, YouTube, Instagram).

Most people who art journal seem to create double page spreads, using every side of every page in the journal. I can’t do that. I know it’s efficient and the best use of resources and gives you a larger canvas to work on, but I just can’t. I like to have a fresh surface to work on and the back side of a sheet of paper that has already been painted on isn’t fresh… worse, you end up with distorted paper on one half and flat on the other which just isn’t a consistent work surface. And while I don’t expect to create any masterpieces doing Wanderlust, I would like to leave myself the option to take a single page out and frame it if I do make something I really like.

Not this week’s homework though. I think that this is one of those layouts that really works best over two pages, with the fold in the middle becoming a compositional element holding the design together. On a single page, it just feels like two things shoved together, even with the stencilled rays in the background trying to bridge the two.

In fact, I would much prefer this as two separate pieces: one with the hinged tags hiding the Imagine, Dream, Inspire definitions and the other with the face and sentiment.

It was fun to make though. As is inevitable with a course like this, there are times when you have to improvise, when you don’t have a particular thing in your stash but don’t want to buy it because it just won’t get used again. In this project, Marjie used a stencil for her face so I came up with a workaround: I headed to Google images to find an upturned face as a reference for creating my own simplified outline and, with a bit of shading and some highlights, it turned out okay.

Class:

• Wanderlust 2019
  (made in April 2019)