Hi everyone. It’s Bonnie here today with Week 44 of the 2017 Art Journal Adventure. The theme I chose this week is Eyes. This is an idea I have been wanting to do for ages and I decided that this was the week. I absolutely love eyes…they are so expressive, the shades and colour combinations are so varied, and they really are the windows to the soul. I love animal eyes as much as people’s eyes, and drawing/colouring them is one of my favourite things to do. Anyway, I wanted to make a collage where sets of eyes were mysteriously peeking out of the spaces between the paper bits.

I began by cutting eyes from magazine photos, varying the size, colour, and the direction they were looking. These were adhered to my 7 x 10 inch mixed media paper base using gel medium, a brush, and my fingers.

Then I delved into my stash of pre-decorated papers. Some were backgrounds I  hadn’t used including a Yupo paper one, some mop-up sheets or scraps, and some gel printed ones. I gathered a pile of similarly coloured papers and began tearing and adhering, again with gel medium. I also threw in some stencilled black cardstock bits because you know I always need a little black on my pages. I loved what I had so far but the eyes didn’t stand out enough to suit me with the busyness of the collaged papers.

If I feel stuck, I walk away for a while and do something completely different, not thinking about the thing that has me stuck. That’s what I did when I got the idea to add baker’s twine loops around each set of eyes. I liked it much better but still wasn’t satisfied with the eyes standing out.

What to do…what to do…I didn’t want to add more pattern or texture. I actually wanted to calm down the area around the loops so I dry-brushed some white gesso around each one, using my finger to blend the white out so that it faded as it got further away from the twine. I liked that effect…no new colours, patterns, or elements introduced…just playing up what was already there.

The wording was printed onto white cardstock, matted with black, and then with glittery silver paper to repeat the silver alcohol ink on the Yupo papers. The words were adhered to the page using foam tape to pop them up. More metallic silver dots were added with acrylic paint stencilled through the circles from the Joggles Punchinella Quintet Minis stencil. Splatter dots were added using a Tim Holtz stamp and Jet Black Archival to unite some of the plainer pieces with the more heavily decorated ones and create a more cohesive piece.

And here is the finished page, matted on the black background common to all my pages in this journal. Now that I’ve got that out of my system, I’m excited to see what you create.There are all kinds of ideas out there…animal or people eyes, the eye of a storm, potato eyes, the third or sacred eye, evil eye, Eye-nstein(LOL)…I could go on. Have fun with it. I did 🙂

Thanks for stopping by.