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Art Journal

I've been busy since school started, but managed to complete this 40 page art journal for a Swapbot swap. I started with an 11" X 15" pad of 140 lb water color paper. I cut this into fourths and painted with a mixture of teal and dark green to get the perfect shade of teal. Next, I splattered the pages with brown acrylic and used a piece of bubble pack to paint the ivory "dots". Boarder papers are mostly Basic Gray and the people, flowers, butterflies, fish and sea shells are printed from creative commons on Flickr, free collage pages on Flickr and Dover samples and CD's. I've always printed collage pieces on card stock but accidentally printed several pages on copy paper. With color ink being expensive, I decided to try to use these pages. I LOVE the way these thinner pages glue down. I use tiny, very sharp scissors to cut the images out, "cropping" parts I don't want to use. Then I use a good quality glue stick (UHU usually) and completely cover the back of the cut-outs (lay the pieces on an old magazine page - when it's completely sticky, turn the page to a clean fresh place to glue). The copy weight paper almost melts into the background and you can hardly tell where the pieces are overlapped. Next I printed the sassy sayings out in MS Word using my favorite font and cut most of them with decorative edge scissors. When the glue has dried, I begin the ink work. I use lots of different type pens (paint pens, professional grade poster markers, different sizes of Faber Castell PITT artist pens in black and sepia). This is my first attempt to bind with the Zutter binder and it turned out okay. I got a couple of the rings a little out of circular, but the pages still turn, so I'm happy.