Journal 52 Week 1

I finally finished my first Journal 52 (J52 for short) spread!  You can read more about J52 HERE.  Last week, I appropriately dubbed 2014 so far to be the 'Year of Challenges'...I think it's a given...but so far, I've kept up with all of my self-imposed commitments.  So goody, goody gumdrops! 

When I remember, I try to take pictures of my pages in various degrees of completion...it actually helps to improve the page, I swear!  It can look great to me with the naked eye, but I take a picture and I can suddenly see that something's a little wonky...and then I can fix it before I move on to the next stage.  I'm sure there's some science-y explanation for this, but I don't know what it is, and mostly, I just care that it works for me...  

Here's my J52 Week 1 spread for the prompt "Up, Up, and Away" (side note: I hope all of the J52 prompts are as interesting to me as this one was!): 

Here it is in the rough sketch stage.  I used a circle template for all the balloons, which felt like a stroke of genius to me...you have no idea how misshapen those poor balloons would have been otherwise!  I messed up on her left hand, and since I used colored pencil, no erasing could occur...but it's ok, I fixed it eventually!

Here is the beginning shading page.  I'm still working on my colored pencil shading skills...more Prismacolors, please!  Thanks to this picture, I noticed how wonky her eyes were...in real life, it didn't seem that bad, but when I took the picture....WHAM!  Those eyes were REALLY off...

(Sorry for the blurriness!)  More colored pencil happening now...also Aquamarkers were added for the balloons and in the hair and dress...and Distress Stain in Tumbled Glass was used for the sky  color of the background...I like how the Distress Stain came out a little patchy...it made it look like a more realistic sky to me.  See how much better the eyes are now?  Still not perfect, but WAY less weird looking!

TA-DA!  Here's the finished page...YAY!  Added some shading on the balloons with a water-soluble pen   Side note: I use Artist Loft (Michael's store brand) Illustration Pens as my water-soluble pens...they claim to be 'water resistant', but they resist ZERO water...not even a little...which I was really disappointed about when I first got them...then I realized I could just go with it and make that work for me...and with a coupon, they were way cheaper than buying on purpose water-soluble pens.  Win/win situation!  Some more shading on the girl done with Aquamarkers.  Highlights on the balloons and the girl with white pen.  And a few touches of Micron to the girl's eyes.  Also look at the hand...it's much better now!  I added some journaling in the strings of the balloons...not much, just the title "Up, Up, and Away", the date, and my signature.

I'm S-U-P-E-R (say it cheerleader style haha) excited with the way this page turned out!  One thing I wish I would have done differently is to make the stings between the balloons and the girls hands be taut instead of all loosey goosey...I mean, physics...come on...  But I guess the idea of balloons being able to carry a girl away is enough of a stretch that I can forgive myself some magical balloon strings that don't follow the laws of nature...

One of the things I really liked about J52 was the lady's suggestion of using a 3 ring binder as your art journal...hence the holes punched in the page.  The reason I'm excited is that I want to make some heavily textured/3-D pages, but I never do, because it's hard (aka too much of a hassle for me personally) to work in the rest of your journal after you put a good and bumpy one in the mix.  Now I can just work on loose watercolor paper with holes punched in it and make the page as thick and juicy as a person could ever want it to be!  I'm kind of excited about that...oh, the possibilities....

Now I've just got to get to work on making my binder pretty...