American Southwest Altered Book Work In Progress

My next round-robin altered book has the theme American Southwest, so I have been playing around trying to come up with something to go in her book. I have been having a bit of a hard time with this one. I just started with some colors that I felt gave the idea of the SW and scraped paint onto a piece of mixed media paper. I then started layering texture using my fingers, various stencils, rubber stamps and other things I had lying around on my art desk. I found an old coloring book I had from Dover on American Indians of the Southwest and hand copied the Navajo sand painting design onto the page.

I also just worked on another background page, trying for different effects. So here are my two works-in-progress.

I will likely cut both of these down before using them. I'll post the final results later this month.

Art Journal Spread - The Documented Life Project Wk. 14

I decided to jump in and participate in The Documented Life Project weekly challenges after looking at all the wonderful art going on in the group. I needed to just jump in at the current challenge and take if from there.

We were on vacation this week at our new Lake House up north and so I did this piece on a page from an old calendar. I love the paper.

I gessoed the paper and then used a tutorial from Betty Franks Krause at  Mystic Tulip Mixed Media , using the supplies I had with me. I had to improvise, of course, but her tutorials are so well written and easy to follow, that I had no problem creating this beautiful background. Then I just used a stencil I had on hand for my name letters and doodled them in, using inspiration from Joanne Sharp's lettering which I found on Julie Fei-Fan Balzer's blog. Isn't the internet wonderful for learning and aren't artists such a wonderful, giving bunch of lovelies!