Let Go and Layer with Mixed Media Journaling

1. Introduction: The best part of making art, in my opinion, is simply playing. That's when the magic happens, when time and space fall away and you're fully immersed in your craft. Experts even say that when you get in the zone, your health improves because your body and mind are relaxed and creative. My name is Jennifer Laurel Keller. I'm an artist and instructor, but what I do is help people gain creative confidence. One of the best ways to play and improve your art is to practice in an art journal. That's because it's for your eyes only and you can totally let go. In this class, let go and layer with mixed media journaling, I will gently guide you through a process that allows you to play and experiment with acrylic paint, paper collage, and expressive mark-making. In the lessons, I'll share techniques for how to start on a blank page and create an intriguing mixed media background. You'll watch over my shoulder step-by-step as I create a focal point and embellish the journal's spread with playful marks. Finally, I'll show you how to seal the pages so they won't stick together and rip, which is a common problem with acrylic journals. I love this practice because it's absolutely full proof. If you don't like something, you just let go of it and cover it up with another layer. This class is right for you if you want to learn how to loosen up and treat yourself to a soul-nourishing journal practice. It's valuable for all levels of experience even if you've never painted before. I won't ask you to draw or paint anything from scratch. We'll be working with papers for our imagery, so all you have to do is play with color and collage. When you finish, you'll have a visual journal entry with beautiful insights that will keep you coming back for more. Are you ready to let go? I can't wait. 2. Materials: Hello, and welcome to the materials lesson. All of my materials that I use in this class are optional. You can use any type of materials for an art journal that you want. You can improvise anyway you see fit, so this is just meant to give you some inspiration. The first thing I have here is a mixed media journal. It is by Canson. It's the XL student grade paper and it's a 7 by 10 inch journal. You can also use a watercolor journal. It could be hardbound, softbound, I like a spiral bound journal. Okay, next I have my palette. I'm using a glass palette with the edges taped off, but you can use anything you like. I also have a variety of brushes and I have all of my brushes on standby if I want something special on a whim. Next I have a couple pints of water. Next I have matte medium by Golden. I'd like to put it in a little squeeze bottle for easy application onto my palette. But this is what I use for adhering and sealing the papers for my collage. Next I have scissors. You might want to know the exact dough blade but I just use scissors and rip the paper. Next I have a paint rag and I keep a paper bag for my paper scraps that I snip off and discard. Then you're going to want some acrylic paint. You don't have to use very nice acrylic paint. You could use crafting paint, student grade paint. I happen to have golden fluid acrylics mainly and I have yellow ocher, burnt sienna, Payne's gray, chromium oxide green, and I have a tube of liquitex basics titanium white. This is because the basics is a student grade paint. So I want to use this up and save my nice white paint for when I paint more complex paintings. Then I have iridescent gold, that's just for fun. Then you're going to want a candle or some wax medium for sealing the pages at the end. Okay, so next I have my paper stash. I keep it in this bin and I have a lot of different papers in here. Types of papers that you might consider using for your journal include scrapbooking papers, doilies, postcards, printed napkins, tissue paper, old artwork, book illustrations. Those are great for focal points. Papers with natural fibers, letters, envelopes, old journal entries for the text for your written handwriting, maps, sheet music, magazines and newspaper clippings, calendar pages, article headings for the words, postage stamps, wallpaper and paint samples, corrugated cardboard, fabric, if it's not too stretchy or thick. I like lace and embroidery and also bubble wrap and that's for stamping. I wouldn't necessarily journal with it, but you can use it as a stamp for the circles. Those are things that I just keep an eye out for and up next, we're going to talk about how to start. 3. How to Start: Hello and welcome to the lesson where we talk about how to start. I want you to know that this whole class is here simply for your inspiration. I will talk about my process, but you can alter it anyway that you see fit because it's simply a journal. It's not going in a museum, you don't have to show it to anyone unless you want to. I want you to keep a really free mindset with this and you can start anywhere. Trust your intuition if you want to try something out, I really want you to feel free. Stay in the moment and you can do any step that I show you in the class at any time, it doesn't have to be in this sequential order. You can always cover things up and let go. I start with paper. This is what I end up with at the end of this lesson. You can see that these papers are very patterned and some have some texture in them. So pattern and texture, I wouldn't necessarily go for something that has a big, strong, bold focal point like an object that you want to really command the attention because we're going to layer over this. These papers are just going to pick through the next layer of acrylic paint. Anything that you have that you're considering using for a focal point, the scale of those objects is much bigger than the scale of the patterns and textures on these papers. I think of it as a theater production like a play, where in this first layer, we're just setting the stage for our background. Then later we're going to introduce the characters, the actors that are our focal point. Let's have a look at how I do my first layer. I'm going to pull out a few textured papers that have patterns and little interesting textures on them. These samples have some stickers on them. I'm just going to rip that off and I'm applying my acrylic matte medium down on my palette. I'm going to rip into these page samples. You can see how textured this one is. It's gorgeous, rough, and it's going to give me some interesting texture when I also paint over it as well. Even if you don't like the color of something, perhaps you can paint over it if it has an interesting texture. Then I'm going to fill my brush up with that acrylic medium and apply it generously to the page. I dab it on in a way where I still get some peaks and ridges in that acrylic paints. I'm just slapping it on. You don't want too much, you'll begin to learn as you move through this process, how much is too much and how much is too little, and you'll develop your own special way of applying it down. But I will apply a lot to the page at first, put the paper down and then pick up the excess and apply it to the top so that it's nicely sealed down. It isn't the final seal that we're going to do on the whole journal spread. I save that for the end and that's all, the pages won't stick together because the acrylic gets tacky when you shut the pages and it can stick to the page that it faces. But for now we want a nice seal just to get these adhered down to the page and nice and smoothed out. I love how those fibers continue outside of that rebuts of rough edge and I love that. You can also use the edges of paper and the corners of paper to work with the page itself. You notice the two corners of that page, I just worked them into the corners of my blank journal page. Any straight lines that are in the papers that you're working with, you can use them along the edge of your journal and not have to do any straight cuts, kind of a timesaver there. I just get those smoothed out. Now I'm going to move to this other paper. This has a gorgeous metallic ink on it and a blue teal background, it's very subtle. Once again, I'm going to take quite a bit of the acrylic medium, apply it down. When you have a thinner paper like this, it can ripple more, so be prepared it's just going to happen. There's no sense in trying to fight it all the way, but you can smooth the paper out from the middle of the page once you set it down in the acrylic medium to prevent excess rippling. If you want a smooth look, I'll show you here. I've got my acrylic going down, I'm putting the paper down, I get it where I want it and I'm starting to smooth it out from the center outwards and that actually had a rip in it. That's fine because we're going to keep layering. Here's some sheet music and I'm looking at the words on it to see if I want to have any of those showing through. I like those two, so I'm just going to rip off the margins. You can if you want, if you have sheet music, it's always a nice thing to include ads and a lot of mixed media. It's just really pretty and I love the feel of it. It's fun looking at old sheet music as well. Once again, smoothing that out from the inside and getting it smoothed over the top as well. Now ripping off the margin again. I'm keeping an eye out for balance on the page, so I used one of my sheet music pieces on one page, I can use the other over here. Then I have a balance of that pattern of the musical notes and it's making the spread a nice, well-rounded composition. Here are more pieces of paper that look really vintage. I got these from a game that was like a pirate treasure mystery game. It has this old world squally handwriting on it. Don't be afraid to overlap. You just want to apply these down in a way that's pleasing to you. All of your papers going to be so much more different than mine. You can always keep an eye out for your color palette. You see my color palette is fairly neutral. There's a little tiny bit of teal in the background of that gold filigree paper. But for the most part I have a lot of neutrals here. Here are some white, I've got browns, beiges, gold. They're all going with this nice, warm, vintage style color palette. Even the paper that's really rough and textured looks nice next to these more elegant squally papers like this dooley and the filigree. I like to mix up these rustic and refined elements, masculine and feminine. Here's a piece of paper. It's from a scrapbooking book and I like the pink. I think it blends well to this color palette. It's also double-sided, so I can use the floral side and the polka dot side, and it's going to give me some variation, but also tie it together with a pink color. I'm just going to set these around to see where would look nice. I like a variation in size of papers, as well as the size and scale of what's on the papers. It's just going to mix it up, but keep it unified as well mixing those pieces of paper around the spread, balancing the composition with similar textures and colors. At this point I'm committing to a color palette. I've got a little bit of that blue-green, that's really like my neutrals and the pink, and I think that looks really nice. Lovely. That is looking really good. Up next, we're going to be covering this layer with some acrylic paint in a transparent layer, so some of these areas are going to show through and some will be covered up. I will see you in the next lesson. 4. Acrylic Layer: Hello and welcome to the acrylic layer lesson. This is what this journal spread is going to look like by the end of this lesson. It's a lot different than how we left it in the first layer, isn't it? I just wanted to show you this so that you have an idea of where this is headed and what's possible with just a few minutes of painting. We're back to where we left off. I'm going to pick my acrylic paints based on the colors that are in my spread right now. I've got some chromium oxide green, and some yellow ocher. Now you don't need as much paint as you would normally use if you were to paint a painting that's this large, we're just doing a very light layer. I also added some burnt sienna and some titanium white as well. Mixing white is going to lighten everything up. I just use a little bit of color and mostly white because I want to keep this spread fairly light. You can see how that green goes well with the background color on that golden filigree paper. It's really nice. I'm just going to blur the edges on my paper samples there. By blurring the edges, I mean, I'm hugging the edges of the those papers. There I went over a word that I wanted to keep. I went over it with a wet rag to wipe off that paint while it's still wet. I'm doing this light brush stroke. I don't have a ton of paint on my brush. I'm letting the paint run out and then fanning it out where I want it to be transparent. So I'm using more pain along the edges of my papers. Anything I want to leave exposed, I'll use less paint and let the paint on the brush run out a little bit and then faintly, It looks like mist going over those pages. Because this is early in the journal. I don't have a lot of pages on the left side. So I put this paper down so I would save my table a little bit. Here, I have some yellow ocher mixed in with my white. I don't think I washed my brush, I just kept going. Here's a little bit of burnt sienna getting mixed in. I'm getting right up close to the spiral brown. If you don't have a spiral brown, you can just go right over it, right over the seam of the paper and have it be one cohesive piece. I love how the paint looks when I go over that texture paper because it clings to the highest ridges of those fibers and looks really cool. I put a lot of layers over that by the end. The same thing with the [inaudible]. It just picks up the paint. When you just have a little paint on the brush, it just picks it up on the top. You can pick up some of the acrylic medium that you use to glue down the pages and mix that in with your paint and make a more transparent paint mix if you want it to be really thin but have a lot of glide to it. You don't have to use a dry brush technique where the paint runs out on the brush. Here's more white on the pellet. If you run out, don't be afraid to add more paint down. I'm going to add just straight white to the center. It's not covering everything out, but it is going to lighten up the middle there quite a bit, which I like. Here I'm adding it to the middle here. Just totally went over those words that I took the time to wipe the paint off over earlier. That's okay. We have to let go. The whole class is about letting go. If you put too much paint down and you realize you went a little too far, you can take your rag, deep it in your paint water, and wipe things off or use it dried, dab the paint off. Another fun thing you can do is take the end of a brush and scribble into the wet paint. This just feels really good. As you move along in this process, I want you to really pay attention to what feels good to your hand. What is fun? If you get caught up doing all scribbles all over the page, there is absolutely nothing wrong with that. I don't want you to get caught up in the playfulness of this experience. The more you can let go of what you think is proper or how things should go, the more of a playful experience you're going to have, the more fun you're going to have. That's drying up, and I'm just going to roll the excess back onto the page. We are pretty much done with that step. Up next, I'm going to work with some focal points and add those over the top of the acrylic paint. I'll see you there. 5. Focal Points: Hello and welcome to the focal point lesson. As you can see in this lesson, I add some focal points to the pages over the acrylic layer that we just did. I have here a bird, a moth, a flower, and I added a little ridge line down at the bottom with a stone village down there. I like that, it's like a medieval village or castle. Here's where we left off after the acrylic lesson, and I have this village on a printout. I'm going to start ripping into it just reduce the size of it. I thought it would be cool if I trimmed off the sky and just let the background be the background for this scene, so my acrylic paint showing through as the background. I'm just going to trim that off and then decide where I want to put it. It would look cute down there. I like how the color palette works with the paint that I've used. I like that position there. I'm just going to crease it over the side of the journal so that I have a guideline. That's a nice little hack for you to decide on where things should be cropped. I have a smaller brush right now, so I have to go back for more acrylic medium more often. It doesn't hold as much, but that's okay. I'm going to line that up where I want it. You do have a few moments to reposition things. I wanted that a little bit more to the right, and so I used my thumb to smooth it out and then used that excess acrylic medium to seal that down. Make sure all the edges are nice and tight on that. Now I have my flower which has some reflective metallic leaves on it, which is fun. I thought I would start by ripping just to see how I liked more rough edge on it, but I decided it wasn't all that wonderful like that, so I wanted to get a little bit closer in on the elements and have more of my background showing through. I'm just cutting around. You'll notice when I cut out these pieces that I move the paper more than I move the scissors, and that seems to work well for me. You can trim up and crop things. If you don't like something, just cut it off of there, it's totally fine. I do a rough cut, and then I'll come in for the details in between these leaves. That little sprig of leaves got a rip in it when I was ripping originally. What I do when I rip through something that I want to be connected is I'll actually just remove it, get it to where I want it to be, and then I'll glue that piece that ripped off just where it would naturally be had it not been ripped. You'll see what I mean here. I'm going to glue that down, I'm going to trim in and around that piece so it's coherent with the rest. Just getting into those little crevices. Here I go with my acrylic medium. I'm going to lay down quite a bit, it's a big piece, and I need some more acrylic medium on my palette. This is a thicker paper, so with thicker paper, sometimes you have to work with them for a little bit longer just to get them to lay flat. They don't immediately stick down all the way sometimes, so I just use my brush a few more times on that, and then I'm putting down the end right where it would have gone. My paint must have not been completely dry, so the acrylic medium did pick up some paint when I was going over the top, so I just came over it with my rag. Here, another couple possibilities for a focal point. I've got this bird, which I really like. This came out of a book, an illustrated book about birds, which I picked up at the thrift store. I'm just going along cutting in. You can trim things off that are too intricate and you don't want to cut around them, and then get into the cracks and crevices. Now, originally, I had the branch on the bird, and then I decided to trim it off. Looking back, I like that branch, but you got to let go. Sometimes we make decisions in the moment and we have to live with them. No more branch, here's my moth. I'm just deciding where I want that to sit, and I think I want it on this page to the left, but it's getting lost in that warm background with a lot of pattern behind it, so what I'm going to do is grab a brush and paint over that a little bit more to give it more contrast. I mixed a little Payne's gray, which is actually pretty blue, and I mixed it into some white paint. I'm really going to lighten that up, and now the moth stands out. That's a nice trick that you can use if something just doesn't look like it's standing out quite enough. Here I do the same thing with the bird. In hindsight, I probably should have gone warmer because that bird is very cool. If you have a warm object, you can paint a cooler background behind it and it's going to stand out more, and vice versa, as well as with light and dark. If you have a light object, you can make the background darker, and so on and so forth. Again, I picked up some of that paint when I went over the moth, so I'm just going to wipe it off and get back some of those details, and now I'm putting the bird down and smooth that out as well. I was going pretty fast at this point, so I didn't wait for the paint behind them to dry for very long, so I just used my rag. Now all of my focal points are down. I think it looks good and I'm ready for the next lesson, which is embellishment. So I will see you there. 6. Embellishments: Hello and welcome to the embellishments lesson. As you can see in this lesson, things got pretty wild. I added quite a few marks, dots, lots of playing with paint here. We already have our basic composition done. I'm going to start to just play around with some different materials. Here I have a pen, I grabbed a couple of pens to see how they would work over this acrylic layer. The ballpoint pen surprisingly was the winner. It worked really well over the acrylic paint, better than the illustration marker that I used first. I'm just going around with some scribbles, and I drew a few stars just for some added texture from a different medium. Here's a white gel pen that I didn't like very much. This is a silver Sharpie. You don't have to have all of these things, you can just grab a handful of pens from your junk drawer, and play around and see what works over your acrylic paint. Using repetition is really fun in a composition as well, several lines or dots. Here I'm going over an element that was in the flower from before. These little curlicues, just reinforcing those with some pen. That was fun, with just some regular pens that I had laying around. I wanted to show you guys this tissue paper. I love tissue paper for going over the top of my background, because it melts away, it becomes extremely transparent when you add the acrylic medium to it. I'm going to save that aside, and underneath it, I'm preparing these branches to go around my bird. I thought my bird was just a little too alone. It seemed to just be floating out in space, so I wanted to ground it a little bit, so I added these branches that it can be sitting in, and then I used some green to give it some leaves. I like it without the leaves looking back. But hey, no big deal, we try things out, and that's the way it goes. I'm going to cover a lot of this still, so I'm going to use my tissue paper and more acrylic paint over the top, because I'm having so much fun playing at this point. Here I have my tissue, it has the line work on it, and I'm just applying it down, and you can see how much of this background shows through. The lines on it build out this branch that I painted before. I've been coming back to this tissue paper for quite a few works that I've done, and I wanted to share it with you, because if you come across really cool white tissue paper that has some co-pattern on it, whether it's polka dots or this floral line pattern, definitely hang onto it because it can add just like a crinkly layer over the top. You can overlap it, and things will show through and they become a little bit more misty and magical underneath. Here's a big piece on the other side because I wanted to balance my composition, so I wanted to use some on the other page as well, and look how much shows through. I just love it. It makes you go like, "I wonder what they did there." Then I started playing a little bit more and I wanted more of that misty look. I added some Payne's gray here to give that little village down below more contrast and let it stand out so you can line things with paint and allow them to show up a little bit more with more contrast, and then I added some to the other page. I just wanted to tone down this composition. I still felt like my bird was not standing out quite enough so I just took some transparent acrylic paint and I'm toning things down. I always say, it's like a pendulum, at least the way I work. I will add a bunch of embellishments and then take them away with a layer of acrylic paint, just to tone things down or else they get way too busy. Then what comes through is just up-to-chance. I love the unknown about how things are going to turn out in the end, what's going to remain, what's going to be covered up. This is a corrugated paper, it almost looks like cardboard because it's made out of craft paper. But you could also use corrugated cardboard box. I put that down and then did a layer of white over it. I liked that, those repetitive lines, so I'm mimicking it with my brush, which is cool. I do that a lot where I'll have an element in a printed paper or a texture, and I'll like it, and then I'll mimic it with my brush in a really simple way, just dancing around the page. Here's my bubble wrap, and you can see where this is going. What I do with bubble wrap is I roll it up, and I'll paint on it. This is the Payne's gray, which is really like a navy blue. Because I felt like I wanted more dark color in this, just for a little bit more contrast. I often end works of art with light and dark. Here's some gold. Gold is not very opaque, it's pretty transparent, so you can get carried away with it. It's not going to cover everything up typically, but do a test spot to see how you like it. This bottle was used up, so I had to open the cap and dig in there. I began with my smaller brush, and I love how this lays over that texture up in the corner. That's great. Then I went up to a bigger brush because I just wanted to apply more of it at once, I felt like the small brush was a little clunky. You can smooth this out with your finger, add it to things that are already existing in a printed collaged piece of paper like with that flower, just to enhance an element on that, or you can just sprinkle it around. I called this, the sprinkles on top, the confetti, when I'll go around with little dots and lines, and just play with a lighter paint, a darker paint, and different colors to see how they react. If you don't like something, just wait for it to dry and go over it. Here's some green, and I just do a few circles. This is really shaping up. Except I felt like my bird just was not standing out enough, because it has this light area and this dark area. The light area was just getting washed into the background. I thought maybe if I scribbled around it densely, around the lighter areas, that they would stand out more against the lighter background. As I worked on this, I was like, you know what this looks like? Is a nest. What I did was, bolt that out quite a bit and made it a nest shape. I didn't do it very realistically. It's just, for me, of course this is a journal. What I did was just allowed this to stand out on its own as a scribbly object. Then I wanted to add some written word, so I just wrote nest over and over again below that. The word nest could mean different things to different people, but I translated it. I didn't think that much about it until later, and we think of a nest like our home, a place to be safe and warm. It's winter where I am right now, so I feel nesty, and I've been decorating for the holidays and things like that. But also it's where we incubate the eggs, it's where birds incubate eggs. Maybe this is a metaphor for incubating my ideas in my journal and this can be my little nesting journal for ideas, my little idea eggs. Now I'm painting around these circles. I like this radiating line around these circles. I let the background show through on the inside of the circle and painted the negative space around the circle, which you can do with any shape, and it's fun to see through. It makes it seem like it's own shape, but you really painted the outside. I like the white over that texture again, and then I came through with some dots down below. I tend to end my pieces with white and a dark color so that I can make sure that I have enough contrast. Then I did some misty layers just to lighten things up and create a little bit more negative space in the piece to tone down the busy nest just a little bit. I can still see through it to that area where I use the bubble wrap. I'm just toning it down. Just a nice way to wind down after such a crazy session of layering and having fun and being really expressive and explorative. I dated the piece December 9th, 2020. Up next, I'm going to show you how to create no-stick pages, so that when you close your journals, your acrylic paint will not stick together and rip when you open them back up. Let's have a look. 7. Non-Stick Pages: Welcome to the Non-Stick Pages lesson, just a little mini lesson for the end to show you how to seal these pages. The key is to use wax. What I do is take a little votive candle and pop it out of its container. The wick just fell out on my hand. I'm going to show you two ways, and this is the first one. I'm not actually going to do it, but I'm just going to explain. You just draw over the whole surface. It doesn't have to be a lot, you just make sure that it comes off a little bit, just like if you were to scribble over it with a crayon. Then what I also have is some wax medium, and this is resin and beeswax. It's like a really soft candle in there. I apply it like moisturizer. You don't need a lot. I'm using a really thin application. You can feel with your fingers where it starts to get used up, and then you can go back for more, but I'm really just picking up a very lite amount. I use less than I would if I were to be moisturizing my hands. You just want to get it on the surface, you don't have to dig it into all of the next synchronize of the different papers, and how they might be crinkled, or get a cardboard. I don't need to get it all the way into everywhere, just on the surface. Just a lite application. You want to make sure this is pretty dry, or else you're going to smudge it. That's all. It smells like beeswax. Here is the finished piece. I love how it turned out. It's all just for play, have so much fun with this. I hope you just adored as much as I do. Remember that yours is going to look totally different, so I really want to encourage you to play, make mistakes, and keep an open mind. Thank you so much for joining me for this class, I had a blast journaling with you. I would love to see your art, if you feel like sharing it or would like some feedback, I encourage you to post a picture in the project gallery, and let me know about your experience. If you enjoyed this class, please consider following me for future updates on new classes that I offer. I also have several other painting classes which you can view on my Main Class page, which is linked below. Remember, art is meant to be fun. So if you show up in practice with an open mind, you'll learn something new every time. Happy journaling, much love.