Arizona Plant - My Art Journal Inspiration

My latest Art Journal Page...

There are several different medias and techniques on this page, let me share some of them with you.

First of all I'm using a Canson Mixed Media ring-bound notebook. I love this because you can use almost any media on it, pencil, pen, markers, acrylic paints, watercolor, ink sprays, glues, almost anything!

My inspiration was the plant in my front yard that I call the Arizona Plant. I've blogged about it before and you can find that post here. But here's the picture I had in front of me while I create the page. I would love to say that I'm a great photographer but it's the flower itself that makes the picture.

I was also inspired by a YouTube video by Nina Ribena where she uses a Salad Spinner to create art! Yep, you heard it here...a salad spinner, one of these! In fact this is the exact one I have that I bought several years ago and use all the time.

Here's the video in case you want to see how it's done. I wish I had thought to take pictures of the samples that I made, but I can at least show you what I made out of them and how.

So I made two discs like the ones above, one using the colors of orange, red, yellow, white and clear glitter acrylic paint and the other with orange, red, brown, yellow and gold glitter acrylic paint. I also made another one using green, blue, yellow and white acrylic paints. 

I then used water colors to paint a blueish-purplish sky and a green bottom for the grass. While that was drying I cut out the petals of the flowers from the discs made with the salad spinner. I know the way I put the flowers together is not exactly the way the real flowers are, but it's just representational. 

I glued the flowers, trying to choose the prettiest petals for the top. I also used the disc with the blue, yellow, green colors for leaves.

I just adore the way the red flower petals came out with the streaks of white! And the different shades of green and yellow in the leaves is lovely as well. The Salad Spinner technique made it so easy. I never could have individually painted them like that, and you can see the glitter in the orange flowers. In real life they are even more amazing!

Once I had the flowers down I painted the stems, first using water color but they weren't noticeable so used a brown marker and then glued down the leaves. 

Then it was time to work on the title of the page which I titled Summer Fun. I used some cute little rubber stamps that my mom bought me for my birthday and an ink stamp with white ink. It was still hard to read so I used a white marker to fill in the letters. 

It was really hard to get the letters all in a row, so go with the flow right? I made them whimsical and not straight at all and then cut out the strip. These were stamped on another piece of the salad spinner paper that was mostly all orange, which is why I didn't use it on the petals.

I felt something was missing on the bottom right so I went through my stash of embellishments and found some hummingbird stickers and loved them because this plant does draw hummingbirds, probably because of the red in the plant. 

I used markers to make the dots in red, yellow and orange and then made a little border around the whole thing in blue and red. I just love putting a border on my pages because it makes it look so finished.

Slowly I am building up my "stash" of things to use in building these journal pages, and I'm finding such peace in doing them, it's so relaxing!

I made a few more discs of salad spinning art that I am saving to use for future projects, so you will probably see a lot more of this type of art...stay tuned!