Art Journal Pages - New Beginnings

I've been making time every couple of days to paint two pages in my book at a time, and I find it really satisfies me.  The reason I got this book in the first place was to spread my wings a bit and be able to be free with my paint without the pressure of a canvas or having to make a complete work of art.  It's just casual, just an experiment, and I can make mistakes and play around, having fun, learning myself, and teaching myself at the same time.  I am also trying to find my voice in my paint, so this is a good book I can use to practice techniques I see that I love and try to translate those into something that is truly me.

And, quite by accident, one of these pages ended up being my first entry for the Mixed Media Monthly Challenge.  The challenge for August is Stencils and Pastes.  I made some of my own stencils, used them to add paste to some watercolor paper, and added some Dr. Ph Martin's Hydrus Watercolors to them.  You can find that post here.  I wasn't sure what I would do with these papers, but I ended up using the following one on this page.

Here's how this page started out.  I knew right away I did not like these colors together, and regretted using the brush I did because everything seemed messy in a bad way. 

Here are some lovely little messy hands.  I got paint out for my kids while I painted since my daughter had begged all day to paint.  First little Lula's hand.  She is turning five tomorrow!

And Grayson's hand.  He is two, and trying to get a picture of his hand was like herding cats!

I painted over some of the previous brush strokes with a different brush, but I didn't like the colors I used!  I stenciled some hearts on with my handmade stencil and added black brush strokes.  Still hated it!

Then I played around with my handwriting and doodling with a white Sharpie oil based paint marker and a pink Elmer's Painters paint marker.  I'm loving both of these right now so much!  Seeing my doodles helped, but I wasn't happy with the colors.

I put down some crackle medium and waited for the required hour.  I think the waiting helped more than anything.  Then I added some Caribbean blue, orange, and pink paint.  I also brushed the word "new" on the page.  I added strokes in green with turquoise pluses on them.  

I painted the opposite page black and placed a rectangle I cut from a gelatin print page down with matte medium.

Then I used my white Sharpie paint pen to doodle around the edges.  I'm not sure what I will put in the middle.  The pages are about new beginnings since my daughter will be starting kindergarten this week, so maybe a picture of her or a silly Lula quote about school.  

I thought the other page needed something else, so I doodled a bit.  I drew this cute flower, but I really took it too far by adding these big black dots.   I hated it!

I tried painting over it, but it didn't look right, so this is where I ended up using some of my modeling paste paper from the other day.  I cut it out into the shape of the curve and put it down with matte medium.  I waited until the matte medium was dry to trim the edges to the shape of the corner.  I really like it!  Looks like these are done for now, but I will probably add more stuff later on.

The Mixed Media Monthly Challenge is also on Instagram, user name @mixedmediamc, so follow them there too!  This is the third challenge, and I look forward to seeing what else they come up with.  Go check them out to find inspiration from their creative team as well as the followers who share their art.