Some of my favorite art journal pages were accidents that occurred over time. Below are just a few examples.
Our Lady of Guadalupe: I started sketching this picture out and didn’t like the direction it was going. I used some gel medium to make it glossy and it ended up smearing my initial drawing. So over a few weeks I just kept going back to it when I was on a plane or stuck in a motel room and just didn’t feel like writing. It was drawn in dots, hatch marks, lines and squiggles using color sharpie markers.
Cruel as the bitterness of life: This page was first a few collage layers that didn’t turn out right. I started covering it with crayon, sanding off layers and ended with a distressed paper/wax “mess” that looked aged with a few ghostly images peeking through. I started writing the words and the gel pen wouldn’t work and because the page was so thick I just ended up carving the words into the page. They didn’t show up on the background so I used some “white out” to fill the carving with. The words are from the movie Frida when Diego Rivera was describing her life’s work at the end: acid and tender, hard as steel, fine as a butterfly’s wing, loveable as a smile, cruel as the bitterness of life. I messed up the quote.
Ganesh: This page resulted from a couple gel transfers gone awry. I just kept painting over them with acrylic and doing another transfer until I got the last one right. There are also some layers of origami paper worked in as well.
Lesson learned: If you aren’t happy with your initial page, leave it and come back….maybe even several times! The more layers you add the more interesting the page becomes.
Comments
great lesson
the first image is wonderful, not just b/c I am fond of madonna images. It reminds me of lomography photography which has blurry, bright colors that make a similarly dreamy effect. especially nice for the context of this particular image.
what i do to avoid mistakes is i draw the image on a separate piece of paper then glue it, so if you do mess up you can throw it away.