Australian Art Journal Swap : Under the Sea...!

Wednesday, January 1, 2020

Under the Sea...!

by Lisa for Melissa

Melissa's journal is a hooge journal full of beautiful papers - I didn't really want to paint over it!

But I did. Lots of lovely sea creatures in this journal already, and I decided to go with some fascinating creatures - jellyfish. Brainless, spineless, dangerous, but strangely beautiful!

I found heaps of lovely photos of jellyfish on Unsplash. Thanks to Unsplash contributors Karan Karnik, Michael Jasmund, Octavian Rosca, Arushee Agrawal and Kanyon Bollinger for your pics that I've based my jellyfish on!

Firstly I painted my background using acrylic paints. Whilst I love the colours of the Dylusions paints, I obviously don't use them often enough - sadly they dry out. My Dylusions Polished Jade was on its last legs, so I mixed it with some other paints in colours of teal and phthalo blue, and sponged it on. Funnily enough, because the jade was a lot thicker than the other paints, if didn't blend properly, creating a lovely background! Win!

Next I drew my jellyfish onto the background using my General's white pencil. It's a bit hard to see in this pic, but it's there!

I coloured my jellyfish using pastel pencils. And the colours looked beautiful, but pastels are very hard to seal - so it was a bit stoopid of me to use them for a journal! Sigh, I should have taken a photo of it at this stage. Oops.

To seal the pastels, I sprayed the pages three times with a sealing spray. And yes, it did work, but it dulled the colours considerably. So much so, that it just didn't stand out at all. A bit of swearing happened here, and then I got out my daughter's Derwents. And proceeded to colour the jellyfish all AGAIN.

Next I sprayed the spread again, and added gel pens for highlights.