I'm really excited to tell you about two digital art journaling projects that I'm currently involved in. First, my new collaboration with my friend Christine Honsinger (aka Fiddlette Designs) is out. Journal Your Art Out 3 is filled with all the great art journaling basics...painted backgrounds and elements, acrylic paint alpha, and messy stitches. It's a great kit to start your digital art journaling!
Next, I have created an exclusive kit for Jessica Sprague's upcoming Digital Art Journaling class which starts next Monday. This is going to be a fantastic class! Besides the kit (which is packed with over 200+ digital art journal supplies like backgrounds, stitching, grungy brushes, photo frames & masks, ephemera and more!) you will get journal prompts from Jessica, along with great video tutorials. Come and join us!
For those of you who aren't sure what art journaling is, it is similar to a scrapbook layout, but instead of photos and stories of your family & events, this is all about YOU! It's a place to explore and practice your art, but also it is very healing because you also explore your feelings and dreams and goals. Think of it as Art Therapy! I have been enjoying painting and creating mixed media in my own art journals in my basement studio. But then I love scanning things in and creating art journal pages digitally too! You can really fill up a page with whatever you want and you come away feeling lighter. Plus, if you create a page digitally, you can always undo something you don't like and you don't have to wash up your brushes after! LOL!
Ready to give it a try? Let's go! We are going to re-create my journaling page above, called "Trust". I picked this word for 2012 because I am finally learning to trust my instincts artistically, to create what calls to me and feel my way as I go. I am also learning to do this in my personal life....
{If you've purchased Christine and I's JYAO3 kit you are all set to follow along. If you haven't, don't worry, just follow along with whatever digital goodies you have on hand.}
First, open up the three backgrounds called nrj-paintedback1.jpg, nrj-paintedback2.jpg and nrj-collage2.png. Drag them all together into one Photoshop file and then crop it to 8.5 x 11 inches.
Arrange the backgrounds so they are in this order and set your layer blending modes and fill percentages as follows...
Layer 2, Hue: 100%
Layer 1, Multiply: 60%
Layer 0 (background) at 100%
Your page will look like this...(feel free to play along with other blending modes and fills to get a look that YOU want!)
Now, open up the file called nrj-stitchedbag.png and drag it over the top most layer. Set your layer blend mode to Hard Light, Fill: 70%
Next, grab the painted heart in the file called "nrj-paintedelement6.png
Drag it onto the top most layer and set the layer blend mode to Overlay: 100%
And now your page looks like this! Pretty, huh? But, we are not done building our page yet...
Now we are going to get messy with some stitching! Got to your brush palette and load the stitching brush set that came with the kit... its called nrj-ch-stitches.abr. Add a circle stitching to the center of the main flower and build a row of flowers underneath the main flower.... don't forget the petals! :)
Next, we'll spruce up these flowers with some painted & stitched elements. Open up the following files: nrj-stitchedheart4.png, nrj-paintedheart1.png and nrj-stitchedflower1.png. Drag them over to our working .psd file.
Drag the yellow stitched heart underneath the far flower and reposition. Similarly, drag the blue painted heart underneath the stitched heart flower and resize/reposition.
Take the stitched flower and make it smaller, dragging it on the layer on top of the stitched heart flower. Center it on the heart. You could also bring in a circle or other stitched or painted heart. Do your own thing...play around until you are satisfied with the results.
For a few last touches, lets bring in the file called nrj-collagepiece3.png
And the file called CAH_AlteredBloomtwelve.png...
Take the layer with the collaged piece on it (the blue one with the word create) and pull it over to the lower left side behind the flower. Set the layer blend mode to Color Burn and set fill to 80%.
For the flower petal, pull it down underneath the flower clusters but above the backgrounds. Center it over the heart near the word create. Leave the blend at Normal and fil at 100%.
So now our floral cluster should now look somewhat like this... but again feel free to experiment, make your own flowers and bring in your own shapes and elements.
One last touch we can do is to add a title to our journaling page. It's easy to do with Christines fun stamped alpha. Load the photoshop brush file called "CAH_AcrylicAlpha.abr"
Stamp a word in any color for your title (I used white on mine at an opacity of 82% for my word: Trust).
Save and print! Or add an element or two! Journal! Do whatever it is YOU want to do on your page. Have fun and experiment.. that is the best part!
Enjoy!
Nan
