Creative Mayhem

Now that I had discovered the wonders of paper in art journaling.  I decided to mess around with a few of my other supplies including a bizarre substance called gesso.  So I grabbed a nearby magazine and began thumbing through it for inspiration.  Soon I came across an article on make-up and it had a graphic of different colored powders.

 I torn it clean out of it binding, chopped it to the size I thought they should be, and pasted them on a piece of 140 lb. watercolor paper. This is the paper  I had been using for my journal pages thus far. I added a block of text and decided to, under the recommendation of, my go to gal, L.K. Ludwig, mix some gesso with blue acyclic paint and wash it over my new smattering of pictures. 

I squirted some blue paint and some gesso onto a nearby paper plate, mixed them like mad, and brushed some of the mixture on my pictures.  The concoction was a little thicker than I anticipated, but I brushed over it a few times to thin out the paint and let the color show through.

When I finished it was a very stark look and to be honest I wasn't thrilled, so I thought I would paste a light colored piece of tissue paper over it to mute its appearance.  I chose a pale pink paper and pasted it over the entire page.  The result was better but not something that I would classify as masterful, but still not bad.

I began showing my art journal pages to my best friend/roommate, including the ones I bombed on.  I did it because her take was always interesting.  So I showed her my latest creation and she, quite unexpectedly, loved it! She thought it was my best work yet!

I couldn't help but smile and think to myself that maybe my "mistakes" aren't really mistakes at all by just artful fate.  I needed to stop thinking so much and just go with the creative mayhem.