Portfolios, where have you been all my life?

This week, I completed two journal spreads. They both have one thing in common. Portfolio water soluble oil pastels. After using them in the spread from my last post, I fell in love with the smudgy quality. It gives a really neat quality to the image, like it is slightly out of focus. If I had known about this super cheap medium, I would have purchased some long ago. I am much more comfortable drawing than painting, especially when there is even a modest amount of detail work. Portfolios lend themselves to a looser style, more "artistic," and less technical. I think I will be doing many more pastel drawings in the future. Now that I have gotten a taste of creamy textured oil pastels, I think I may actually try out the more expensive oil pastels one day. This is exactly the type of thing I was hoping to get out of art journaling.

This first spread was done on the instructions from my sinus surgery a year ago. It made me think of a skull. I went a little overboard with the canine teeth, so it looks a little like a vampire skull, but I think it gives it character.

The other spread was started when I had a bunch of paint and glaze leftover from a somewhat failed attempt at painting a face. I just painted short brush strokes all over the pages. The next day, I took some cheap paint markers I got from Daiso, the Japanese dollar store, and painted in some circles. The rest sprang out from that. The colors and shapes remind me of paintings from the early abstract movement. The colors do, especially. I am a fan of heavily saturated color, so this is a little foreign to me, but I do like it.

Tomorrow, I am going to the Seattle Art Museum. There is a special exhibit including such artists as Gainesborough, Van Dyck, and freakin' Rembrandt! When I took art history in college, I had to do a paper comparing two randomly selected artists from a hat. I selected Rembrandt and Hals. The Hals portrait I chose is in this collection! It ought to be a very inspiring evening.