The New Journal for 2012 – Page 1.  Gesso, oil pastel, collage, gouache.  I’ve been thinking about horizon lines –  Don’t think this really counts as a horizon line – but that’s what I was thinking anyway!  This journal is one I’ve had for a while, it’s an “Earthbound Cachet” journal with brown paper pages (that I love) and a plain brown paper binding.  It’s 8.5 x 11 when closed.  I like to use the pages open, and the line down the middle doesn’t bother me.  I plan on writing more in this journal than I have in the past for the art journals.  For the last couple of years I’ve been trying to write less and draw or paint more – but now I think I can balance it.  As in the past some of these journal sketches will become larger paintings.

This is how the page looked before I painted it.  I like to work a few pages ahead and gesso them.  This makes them strong enough to withstand most anything I do to them;  water media, attached objects, acrylic, etc.

Sometimes I add color to the gesso with a little squirt of gouache.  You could also use acrylic – but I don’t like the shiney look that acrylic has when it dries, especially on paper.  Sometimes I lightly sand the pages after I gesso them.  It gives it a really nice soft feeling that is good to draw on.

This is what it looks like from the outside.  I will decorate and paint the binding after I complete the inside pages.  I like to wait until I’m all finished creating the inside so the cover will coordinate with what has happened inside.   You can see the faint square where I took the gummed sticker off – should have done that when I first got it!  But after its decorated and painted the mark won’t show. The pages are all brown inside, and the binding is plain brown paper also.  I bought this one at Wal-mart a few years ago.  It was very inexpensive – I haven’t seen them recently – but they can be purchased online – just not as inexpensively!

This page has a little strip of antique silk glued onto it – I water colored the silk.  It went down very nicely with matte medium as the glue.  I don’t gesso all the pages because sometimes the brown paper is nice just as it is for drawing.  I usually have to remove quite a few pages to not overfill the binding.  I just use a razor blade to slice out the page – sometimes I leave an edge when I slice it out, and I do the same to the one behind it – then you can glue another page of something inbetween the two strips – a page of a different size or something like that.