Artful Academy journal – February

Series: Artful Academy 2020 journal #3

The prompt for February was “music” and, for this one, the instructor used sprays to build up the background with some printed lyrics providing the focal point. This provided me with two challenges.

1. I am not a huge fan of sprays. Most of the craft sprays are either not lightfast (not so important in an art journal, but I prefer to use supplies that will last where I can) or they are water-reactive (which has its uses but I like to be able layer colour with it becoming mixed and muddy). And then there’s always the problem with the spray mechanism becoming clogged or just breaking.
2. And then there’s the lyrics. I do like music, though I tend to go through phases of listening and not (too much choice!) but I am rubbish at remembering lyrics when I’m not listening to something. So trying to come up with something relevant to a galaxy or night sky was hard; I did try, but eventually gave up and took another approach instead.

I solved the first problem by getting a pack of cheap empty spray bottles from Amazon and mixing up my own sprays based on acrylic paints and pigments. I did make a slight mistake mixing up the pink: instead of grabbing the pink powder pigment, I grabbed the pink LIT pigment, which looks very similar, but glows in the dark. So yes, there are patches of this that will glow if it’s exposed to enough UV light… I just wish I’d thought to do it deliberately!

The sprays worked well and created a nice galaxy effect that I enhanced by blending black ink in patches over the top. Some subtle white stencilled dots added to the texture. I also stencilled some stars, but they came out a bit pale so I went over them with a white pen. Some white splatter completed the galaxy look.

For the second problem, well, once I’d given up on finding lyrics that I liked, I had to come up with another way of responding to the prompt and I settled on creating a stream of notes drifting from the swirl of petals in the corner (stencilled using silver embossing paste). Luckily musical notes are pretty simple to draw, though I still planned out the positioning on a piece of tracing paper first. My trusty Molotow liquid chrome pen provided the silver colour; on flat, non-porous surfaces, this pen creates a perfect shiny chrome finish, on other surfaces it can result in a texture like discoloured anodised aluminium. I did go through my stash of word strips and found some that fitted with the night sky theme.

Once again I made a collage on the back of the previous page to match the colours used in my galaxy.