More Art Journal Play

In the Heat of the Summer

Had a go at acrylic finger painting today in my Art Journal today.
I used the Week 14 Prompt for the Journal 52 Project  - Rain or Shine - which was to create a page about weather or your favorite season.
It also meets the Week 7 prompt for The Documented Life Project which was to draw a shape and repeat it multiple times.

I call this one "In the Heat of the Summer"

I've had a whitish page that's just been sitting in my art journal.  I say whitish because it was a page gone wrong that I covered up with gesso.  The original color was a green Silks glaze and it wasn't quite dry when I covered it in gesso, so it tinted the gesso just a tinge of green.  I had taken different size bottle caps and twisted a bunch of circles in the wet gesso and had left it to dry.

I've looked at it several time and wondered what I was going to do with it and so when I sat down at my desk today and opened my journal to that page, I decided I was going to give it a go.

I grabbed a cup of coffee and got to work!

It is starting to get a lot warmer here in Florida and I am looking forward to the hot summertime!

I thought the circles looked like circles of sun radiating heat, so the first thing I did was grab some heavy body acrylic yellow and smudged some color onto the circles.

You can see the imprint of the circles in the picture below.

Then I realized I didn't do the background first, so I roughed in a blue sky and then pulled out some heavy body acrylic red, yellow and green and swirled in some color in each of the circles.

I didn't stop to grab the camera, because my fingers were covered in paint and I was in the groove!!

You can see by the picture below that I also started laying in some white puffy clouds on top of the blue to add some depth.

  

Everything up until this point was don with my fingers, but once I got this far I pulled out my Fine Liner and my Acrylic Inks and added some lines and dots in red.

 I had a spot that was looking too empty so I decided to swirl in another circle of paint.  

This one ended up being the focal point of the page as I added more and more color.

More Fine Liner work with dots and lines in green.

Then I pulled out a Tim Holtz stencil and finger painted in some rays of sun.

First in yellow and then in orange.

Then I started adding some glow from the center with yellow and then green.

I used a swirl stencil and laid in a few white swirls coming off the sun and a black Montana Paint Pen to draw some loose circles around a few of circles.

More blending a tad more orange to my sun and along with using the Fine Liner to add some orange lines and swirls to some of the circles and I'm calling it done!