Monday, February 10, 2014

Sketchbook Pages: A Week in the Life

The idea for this page came mid-way through the pink "7 Things I Love" spread I showed you last week. I knew I didn't want to turn that page into this idea, so I jotted it down on the paper I always have covering my desk:
I wanted to document a typical week in my life right now - things I do almost every Monday, Wednesday or Thursday. Once I finished the pink page, I immediately dove into this one.

Since I almost always start with a layer of gesso, I decided to mix things up this time. After taping the spine with masking tape (to help protect the other pages in this book from bleeding paint), I started by "journaling" with a blue Neocolour II watercolour crayon. Nothing too profound, I think I just wrote the days of the week, but I wanted that extra layer in there. The gesso spread everything around nicely:

Next, to execute my week idea, I roughly drew seven boxes in watercolour pencil and tore some patterned paper for each one. I also tore pieces for all the borders and glued those down before each of the panels.
I went with this colour scheme because I had these papers on my desk (I just love pulling out papers to make a collection... which reminds me, I used to post "coordinates" from these stacks. I should get back into that!).

Next up was layers and layers of paint. I used almost all my greens, along with some grey, yellow and touches of copper:
I kept layering paint until I was happy with the depth and texture of the spread. I included some gesso to help lighten some of the boxes since I was going to be journaling inside them.

Once I was happy with the paint, I pulled out some pens and crayons and added some doodling here and there for more subtle texture. I used a white Sharpie to define each day and then black pen to complete the page.

This page makes me so happy - the colours are gorgeous, even better than these photos show. And I just really like that I have a record now of what a typical week looks like in my life right now. I'll have to do it again in a few years in order to compare!

Layers:
  1. masking tape (protect the spine)
  2. journaling with a blue Neocolour II (watercolour crayon)
  3. gesso
  4. collage (patterned scrapbook paper, ledger paper, handmade paper: packing paper painted by me)
  5. paint (Golden acrylics: sap green hue, chromium oxide green, titan buff, Indian yellow hue, Paynes grey, iridescent copper light (fine); Amsterdam acrylics: olive green light)
  6. gesso
  7. doodling (brown Sharpie, Neocolour II in green and brown, oil pastels in green and brown)
  8. white Sharpie
  9. journaling (black Sharpie)

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