Art Techniques for Art Journaling

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Art Journaling Mini Series 

Today's offering in the art journaling series is all about art techniques and tutorials to get you started in your creative art journal.  I will look at using distress inks with make up sponges, adding salt to create effects in watercolour, adding talc to thicken acrylic paint and how to make your own spray inks/paint.

Equipment needed if applying all of the techniques:

Watercolour paint, Acrylic Paint, Salt, an ink pad of your choice, a paintbrush
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Watercolour Brush -UK
Water color brush -US
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​Rubbing Alcohol (Ideally 90% - I used 70% but it isn't quite strong enough) and Talc. You can View Part 1 here.

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Please note the final piece in the video is not a finished product, I wasn't creating anything in particular, I'm just showing you the techniques, they don't all need to be applied at once.

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​Ink Pads and Distressing Pages

In the video I have posted below to go alongside the tutorials I have used a Tim Holtz distress ink pad in Antique Linen.  Rub the ink pad liberally across the page and then use a cheap make up sponge or a stamp blender to blend the ink on the page.  

​Of course you don't have to blend the ink, you can leave it as it is, it's all down to personal preference.  This makes a great base for creating an art journal page and ageing the page.  You can use any ink pad to do this.  I personally prefer the range of distress and distress oxide inks from Tim Holtz as they are much better for blending and are a much better quality for using on backgrounds. Have a look at the inks here.

​Adding Salt to Create Texture in Watercolour 

Next I applied watercolour to the opposite page in two tone variations using an Aquash Pentel watercolour brush (UK) or Water color brushes, here (US), great for art journaling on the go as you don't need to keep dipping the brush into water.

​Take a small handful of ordinary salt and add it to the watercolour.  This will create texture to the page as it reacts in the water. It is a good idea at this point to either speed up the drying with a heat tool or hairdryer or wait an hour for it to dry.

​I love the effect this gives as you can see below, it really makes the page pop.

Adding Talc to Acrylic Paint

Next I chose an acrylic paint and mixed it with talcum powder.  Baby powder is actually better than the one I used.  Add a fair amount the the acrylic paint with a bit of water in order to thicken up the paint.  

You could also do a similar technique by mixing it with a thicker matte medium or heavy matte medium.  It's a great way of thickening up your paint and really giving the page texture.
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Related Post: Creating Texture in Your Journals

Make Your Own Spray Inks

Finally you could make your own spray inks using a small spray travel bottle (you can pick these up from the Poundshop). Add just less than a quarter of water, add around 2-3 squeezes of acrylic paint and add a small amount of rubbing alcohol.  

​Shake well for around 3 minutes. Test the spray first on some scrap paper as it can be clumpy when you first spray.

This is a much cheaper option than buying your own and you can control the strength of it and make as many as you want in different colours. Win, win!

​Join my Facebook Art Journaling group: 
​Kerrymay._.Makes a Mess

So there you have it, a few simple techniques to get you started (make sure you watch the video for a visual tutorial).  

I can't wait to see what you create - use the hashtag #kmmam on twitter and Instagram or tag me - thank you so much for reading

​Kerry xx     

Related Posts:
View the entire series here - Art Journal Series  
Scraping techniques and Brayer rollers
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