Prismatic Black

I'm Open...

One of the best things about art journaling is its ability to distract me from feeling down — and while I'm distracted, rearrange my head, to where I emerge into a less-crummy frame of mind.

I don't expect the page to be any one particular thing when I come at it that way. I'm just trying to make myself feel better. So I choose the most self-indulgently pleasing page ingredients I can see on my shelf, no matter whether they seem to work together or not.

And yet, somehow they always seem to blend into something unexpectedly fun. And not only does the process of creating feel great, but what I'm left with is a vaccination against the blues.

Childhood, Adulthood

Sometimes I start a creation with an idea, and sometimes I just go, “hey, this random choice might be pretty.” The latter often turns out to be a revealing mirror at the end.

When I was young, two school assignments I had were memorizing a list of prepositions, and using a ruler to mark off and draw a geometric web. Words and lines, speech and math. Things stay with you, surfacing at intervals to lay themselves on top of your grown-up knowledge.

You can't lose what's truly yourself — but everything you become is prodded along by what you once were. Art feels like the ongoing trick of bringing those forces into a truce.

Beauty And Ugliness

This week's creativity found me in the odd position of not feeling physically well, but determined to push through the process of making art anyway. I did my best to keep it simple, finishing up a couple of pages and letting the materials play themselves however they wanted to. 

When I do this, sometimes the mood I'm in shines through. I feel frustrated in general when I have low energy, and create a mess just to lash out in a small harmless way. 

And I'm left with art that at first glance seems ugly, or explores that line between cool and sickening that (if not taken too far) is actually really interesting. I feel like the original meaning of the term “grunge”, as wildly overused as it has become in thirty years, may have described that threshold. 

To create the effect, I made a black print on the page with the gel plate and acrylic paint. When it was dry, I poured Clear Tar Gel on each page, squeezed some neon yellow acrylic paint into it, and swirled it around with the end of a paintbrush. After the 9000 hours that took to dry, I touched some neon blue paint to the swirl on the left, and made fingerprints with it on the right. The other accents are glitter tape and Dymo embossing label. It captures the woozy-yet-bold headspace I was in pretty well, I think.

The other two spreads were calmer. I played around with bright neon paints, clear varnish and metallic Sharpies, and washi tape. Lately I've gone in with fewer clear ideas, and more just a desire to experiment with materials and how they interact. Especially things I can pour and squish around. The results are migrating to larger pages outside my art journal, which I might share in upcoming weeks.

Hello, Fediverse! Come look at some art! :)

I'm Erosdiscordia, and this is where I'll document my creative work: art journaling, simple printmaking, photography, and whatever else calls to me.

Feel free to follow and interact if you'd like!

Gel Plate Printing, Second Try

Typically  I stick to whatever DIY version of an item or a process that's working for me. But in the case of homemade printmaking, I went ahead and bought better supplies. I've been having so much fun making monoprints on the kitchen table — it seems pretty clear that this is more than just an experiment, and is turning into an actual hobby.

Something more durable than the DIY gelatin plate would last longer and not require me to keep making it over and over in the fridge. And as much as I wanted to keep the entire thing as cheap as possible, I was really struggling to get a smooth layer of paint on the gel plate with just that brush and cheap dollar store black paint.

So I looked online for alternatives, and weighed price vs. not-shittiness for the three bare-minimum items that homemade printing seems to need: a gel plate, black acrylic paint, and a brayer to roll it on.

The Speedball brayer seemed to be well rated, and their version of the gel plate was a reasonable price.

I also got some Liquitex Basics Mars Black paint, having used it before and liking how it was just a little more fluid than a regular tube of acrylic paint.

One of the other things I bought, on the recommendation of the YouTuber “Nitsa Creative Studio”, was a sheet of hard acrylic to place the gel plate on. Not only does this protect one side of the plate, but it also means that a loaded plate can be picked up and used as a giant stamp.

I can think of a lot of instances where that might be easier than trying to place the paper over the plate itself — for example, if I were printing onto fabric, or a large sheet of paper, or a big canvas.

I had loads of fun trying out the gel plate with the black paint, as well as some white gouache, and purple and turquoise and gold craft paints. When I get any new tool, I tend to just throw everything I already own at it, and see how it works.

I had some ideas in mind for what I wanted the prints to look like — but as usual, everything took a turn. Real art is not what ideas you come up with. It's about how well you recover and keep going when your original concept doesn't work.

I'll make a whole post soon about magazine image transfers, and how bloody hard they are to do. But a few of the ones I made struck me as awesome. These are both from Vogue.

I also experimented with multi-layer prints, scratching layers off the second plate of paint to leave room for the first layer of print to show through.

Another unexpected development was how great the ghost prints (the second print made off a plate) looked when placed on a blank sheet of kraft paper.

I wish the gold showed up better in these photos!

I was happy enough with these five prints to hang them on the wall by my bed. I might make it a gallery wall while I'm here — it's motivating to wake up and see what I've made.

I've since read that even better results can be gotten from the Speedball gel plate if you use traditional monoprint inks, so I might save up for some of those and try them, too.

A Rule of Three?

I've noticed a pattern, when I get creative, of making three things in quick succession. The first is based on the actual idea that I had, and captures the intense dance to make it reflect the thing I'd envisioned.

When I'm lucky, it turns into something different, but still awesome.

The second created thing begins with only half an idea, sort of leftover brain-work from the first concept. It gets toyed with as I'm juggling the mutation of the first piece to a successful landing, and almost always turns out just as good, for less work.

Then there is the third creation, which is like the coda of my creative juice for the day. It's always simplest, and often kinda cute. When I hit all three of these types of pieces in one sitting, there's a completion to it, and I feel satisfied.

Homemade Gel Plate Printing!

I was scrolling through an image search for art journal inspiration, and I kept seeing awesome examples of a technique I'd never heard of: gel plate printing.

It apparently became popular a couple of years ago. I've always been interested in printmaking, but all the methods of doing so (besides block cutting, which I don't enjoy) were either expensive or required a ton of materials and workspace, or both.

Gel plate printing, at its most basic, involves spreading acrylic or printmaking paint in a thin layer over a gel plate, using any of a number of method to create a design in it, and then placing a sheet of paper over the plate and pressing down with your hands. When the paper is lifted, the paint design comes with it.

It's a version of monoprinting, as the exact image can't be made more than one time.

Various gel plates are sold, but there are also recipes to make a DIY plate out of gelatin and a few other ingredients. Here's one recipe.

I didn't mind making a temporary gelatin plate just to experiment and see if I liked the process. So I used a recipe that was basically plain gelatin and water.

The resulting plate was unappetizing looking in the fridge, where it solidified — but I was excited that the recipe worked! It's always so nice to Successfully Make a Thing.

One of the methods for creating the image on the paint-covered gel plate is magazine transfer. Basically, I spread cheap black craft paint onto the plate as thin as I could with a regular rectangular brush (not recommended), and then laid a magazine clipping down in the paint.

The theory is that the lighter parts of the image will soak up the paint, and the toner in the black parts of the picture will repel the paint. Therefore when you (carefully) peel up the image, paint will be left where the black parts of the image were.

This creates a “stamp” you can then press paper onto.

In reality, magazine transfers with a gel plate are screamingly difficult. I get one out of every ten or so tries to work. It depends heavily on the magazine you use, what types of ink it prints with, the age of the magazine itself, and sheer chaotic luck.

But I kinda like that.

Things that force me to test my ability to analyze and keep track of a ton of technical factors, while ultimately mocking me for trying, and creating wild-card images at random: I will definitely be doing more of this!

Two Art Journals At Once

During a recent trip to Richmond, Virginia, I hit up this old haunt: Plaza Art Materials, on Grace Street by VCU.

I didn't need anything in particular, but I hadn't been in the store in two years, so I enjoyed looking around.

A couple of tiny sketchbooks caught my attention, and weren't expensive. One was a spiral-bound book with heavy black paper (breaking my rule about spiral binding, but god I love black journal paper), and a cloth-bound book with ivory sheets.

The latter one was a 5”x5” Global Art Hand Book, produced by Speedball. I'd never really had such a small sketchbook or art journal before, and neither had I used a square one. But the paper felt so nice, I decided to give it a try.

When I got back home to the mountains, I laid all my art journals out to look at them. Three of these I've talked about — the other three are in a “future use” pile, that I swear won't grow to mountainous size this time.

(Missing are the sketchbooks from the early 2000s, and the art journal from 2014. Those were sadly lost in a move, and I'm glad I took photographs of the pages I made in them.)

Since it seems like I'm actually making a go of this art journal thing again, I gathered up all my art supplies and tried to organize them in my small room. My desk doesn't always look quite this messy when I'm making something, but it's close.

I made a few quick marks in the new small sketchbook, just to see how the paper worked with heavier things like paint and ink. No wrinkling at all, especially if I worked with the pages clamped down until everything was dry.

I tend to always come back to making that bastardized paisley on the right. It's filled the margins of notebooks since I was sixteen.

For this spread, I used an awesome image from a 1940s National Geographic magazine, of some dancers performing in Africa. It seemed a good spot to use the blue jay and dove feathers I'd found out near the feeders.

I try hard not to have more than one identical outlet for the same type of project, because I sometimes have a tendency to spread things too thin, then get discouraged.

But keeping a large art journal and a small one at the same time actually seems to help. It's easier to make a quick spread in a small journal. But a large journal offers more space to make a huge mess and experiment. Right now I need both.

Butterfly

One of the goofiest things my brain does is tell me something is “cheating” if it's easy.

Say I'm in the mood to make an art journal page, but I have no ideas. Why not do a thing I've done before: pour some paint onto a spread of pages, fold the book closed, and then enjoy the awesome “butterfly” pattern the paint makes?

“But it's too easy!” my mind whines. “It's not art! Art Is Hard!”

Maybe it's not art. Who gives a shit? Look at this pattern, isn't it kinda cool?

I let it dry, and did the same thing again, with a bronze metallic color. It looks pretty rad over the gold.

I also played around with spraying some metallic Distress Ink over a pattern of leaves, and then securing a feather over it with vellum cut in the shape of a leaf.

For the first layer of this design, I poured my coffee into the sketchbook. Why the hell not?

Nobody in the world gets to make the rules for art.

Back To the Hardbound

After using the dollar store sketchbook and art materials for a bit, mainly to just get comfortable and play around with making marks, I sat down to assess my feelings about the matter.

My conclusion was that I did want to keep creating visual images. It wasn't bringing back too many falshes of 2014's or 2015's struggle. But I didn't want to use the sketchbook I'd bought. It was too small, somehow, or the wire binding was bugging my hand. Or maybe the paper was too thin, and more suitable for pencils, and I wanted something bolder.

So I got in the car and made the pilgrimage down the interstate to WalMart. Yes, I live that far out in the countryside.

I bought a 9”x12” hardbound sketchbook, by a student-level brand called Royal Langnickel. WalMarts with an art section generally don't have anything higher quality than student-level, but that's okay for an art journal. I mean, I've happily used a composition book before. Sometimes cheaper is better, because you don't feel like your art has to live up to its own paper.

Mainly I wanted something that would lay flat without having a spiral binding to annoy me and break up the flow of the two facing pages. I tend to conceptualize both facing pages as “one image” — and a wire spiral in the center makes that difficult.

As I did with the first (composition book) art journal in 2014, I spent some time at the beginning removing some of the pages throughout the book. This makes room and protects the binding from being stretched once the book gets bulky with use.

I also used washi tape to add in some different types of paper into the book — black cardstock, graph paper, vellum, even some transparent pink PVC. It can be enjoyable to fit your idea around whatever the next weird paper is that you forgot you added to the journal in the beginning.