Quiet Your Mind | Mixed Media Art Journaling | Gelatos

Hi everybody, Jane here, thank you so much for watching today and welcome. Today I will be working in the Dina Wakeley watercolour journal, just showing you there that it's by Ranger, and I'm just going to grid off my page. Now today I was really feeling like I just needed to do some journaling. I don't do journaling as in written art journaling, although I do almost always put a sentiment on my page, but I don't find that that's something that I need to do with my journaling. But today I just felt like I needed to get some calm going on in my mind, and quite often art and craft is an ideal way of helping to maybe order your thoughts or maybe sometimes just get away from some of your thoughts. The world is quite heavy I feel at the moment, I'm usually a optimistic, positive type of person, even I am feeling a little bit worn down by what is going on in the world. We also have things going on in our own lives, not bad things, just things that cause a lot of mental energy to be used up, and so I wanted to do something that was fun, but also sort of quite expressive and didn't require me to think a lot. So I thought, because gelatos are something I don't use very much and are quite a tactile and expressive medium, I decided to go with those today. So I've put my page, and this is, like I said, it's in the Dina Wakeley watercolour journal, but I did put down a layer of clear gesso to start with, because I find that gelatos work better on a gessoed surface, they just move more easily, and I just got out some reds, not reds, pinks and purples and blues, and the colours I chose were snow cone, cotton candy, blueberry, lavender and bubblegum, and I just scribbled some circles on. Now if anybody watches Denise Love, you will see she has done quite a lot of circular abstract pages, so it was loosely based on the idea of Kandinsky and Denise's abstract work that she does, but I wanted to do it in a much more, I suppose a harder way, not so nice and gentle with watercolour, I wanted to really get that colour down. That's where my thoughts were at with this page, so I'm just really going for it. I had no idea where this was going, I just wanted to deal with the colour and the mark making, it just felt like I needed to be very intentional with those marks, and so once I had put that colour down, I went over with my water and my brush to just water some of that gelato out, because gelatos are water reactive, so you can add water to make them more of a paint sort of effect. You can, I think, leave them as they are, but because they are like this gel type consistency, you can also smudge them, so if you do leave them and don't water them out, then you are at risk of them getting them everywhere, so I do like to, as much as possible, water them out. They're not permanent, they will be able to be reactivated, although I find with most products that you water out, once they are watered out, unless you're going to be really throwing water and scrubbing them, they're pretty secure where they are, like I say, as long as you're not messing about with them too much. I'm just going in, getting lots of water on there, and because of that, I did have to give this quite a dry afterwards with my heat tool, which obviously won't make you sit through. Once it was dry, I did get out my Copic Acryas and some Stabilo Woodies. Now I very quickly realised that the Copic Acryas were not going to work very well on this, they've got quite a fine nib, and I don't think all of the gelato was totally watered out, so it just was not letting that acrylic marker go over the top very well, because it's just a fine nib. So I went in with the Woodies, which are also a water reactive product, so you can water these out, but I feel happier actually sometimes putting these down just as a pencil. The one thing I would say is, you do need to be a bit aware with these, adding other products over the top, because they've got quite a waxy consistency. Now in a moment I do use the Artex marker, but because they are more of a brush tip and the ink sits in the nib constantly, they seem to be okay to work over the top of this, but more of the bullet nibs, more of the finer nibs, I have actually ruined pens going over the top of Woodies, so just be aware of that if you are using them. So I'm just putting some marks on, like I said, there wasn't much intent, but I did know that I wanted each square to be more or less the same, just with different colours and the marks in different places, but I wanted it to be a repeat of each other throughout the whole sort of spread. I knew I also wanted to add some gold in here, so I've got the Kuretake mica ink in gold in this fine liner bottle, get a little bit started and I just wanted to keep going with that swirling sort of circular motion. Now when I got past the first pour, I think some of the gelato had clogged up the tip of my bottle there, so I just went in with the lid, which has like a needle tip in it to help keep it unblocked, and I just unblocked it and went back in and finished off the other pours, just something to be aware of. Once that had totally dried and it did take a little while because it was quite thick in places, I wanted to go over with some stenciling and here I'm using, this is a Shady Designs stencil based in the UK. I will list all my products in the description box below and it's called Moroccan Trellis and I thought it went with the vibe that was going on, I felt it had that sort of look about it, the colours and the gold in these images, and I'm just going in also with some titanium white paint from Amsterdam, it's an acrylic paint. My favourite part is always to remove the tape and once it's removed, I realised that I did have quite a lot of mess going on, maybe that, it was echoing my brain, but I wanted to sort of neaten up the edges a little bit, but I didn't want to draw really, really straight lines, so I'm going in with this Copic Acria, this is the colour Pansy and I'm just doing a very, very rough border around each of these circles. I felt they needed to be contained within something and it also then just helps to distract, hopefully slightly, from the mess that's gone outside the lines. Not that I'm worried, it's in a journal, you know, it's not meant to be something that people were going to be looking at on a gallery wall, so that's something always to remember, your journal is for you, unless you're on YouTube, but you know it's not meant to be perfect, it's a play area for me, it's where I can just out things if I need to, which isn't very often, most of the time it is genuinely for fun, but it gives me a chance to play with mediums, to test things out and to try different techniques and that's what I mostly use my art journaling for. Now here I decided, for some unknown reason, to go in with the pen into some of these shapes because the stencil wasn't as crisp as I would usually like it. As it happened, I think it went quite well with the whole purpose, the meaning behind this spread, but I put a little bit of this purple in. I did, after I finished, go in with a white pen and get rid of that because I didn't like it and finally here is my sentiment from Lemon Creation, which I think just said everything I needed to say for this spread. So here is the final piece, thank you ever so much for watching today, I hope you enjoyed it and I hope everybody is doing well and if you did enjoy it, do please give this video a thumbs up and if you're not already subscribed, I'd love it if you could subscribe as well and some people, I think on a mobile device, you might get a hype button, if you'd like to hype the video that all helps as well and at the end here you will see a list of my super supporters, these are my YouTube members, a big extra thank you and shout out to them and until the next time, bye!