Maybe you like to problem solve? Maybe you enjoy challenges? A healthy drawing practice gives you daily opportunity to set problems for yourself and increase your skills.
Every one who knows me knows that I like to pre-paint my pages and add collage elements, and do all manner of “weird” stuff on my pages before I ever get around to sketching and painting on the pages.
I see this practice as setting little “problems” I’ll need to solve in the execution of painting. Here’s a collaged background I painted over which impacted on the final surface of the drawing by adding a texture I would have had to work even harder to obscure. On that day I decided I liked the visible texture.
The fun thing about setting little problems for yourself is that you get to decide how you resolve them and you get to decide for yourself whether or not they were resolved to YOUR satisfaction.
It can’t be more satisfying than that.
Here’s the page before I painted on it—to give you a sense of what I was met with when I opened the book to this page spread.
The book one I hand bound using Strathmore’s Museum Mounting board, 1-ply. It’s thin enough to fold and tear for binding. It’s thick enough to be fun with collage. It’s 100 percent cotton and archival because it’s made as a museum mounting board for use in frame so that will appeal to people who have archival longings. It also comes in large sheets that are 32 x 40 inches, and when you break them down with the grain you end up getting a lovely 8 x 10 inch book with no paper waste.
From about 1999 through 2011 it was my go-to paper for binding my own books. It was relatively inexpensive (given that there was no teardown waste) to use for my binding classes where students wanted big books, and in which we were going to work with mixed media.
I only have a couple books left bound with this paper (and with the arrival on the market of Strathmore’s 500 Series Mixed Media paper I stopped buying the Museum Mounting board), but I decided, during a difficult spring this year, to pull one off the shelf and have at it.
Let me be clear, if your interest is triggered—it is NOT in any way a wet-media paper. You know by now, if you’ve read my blog for any length of time, that I love drawing and painting on non-watercolor papers.
(This paper loves all the pens I love to use, and I also use pigmented rubber stamp ink, acrylics, NeoColor II, and color pencil on it; in addition to watercolor and gouache. But because it is not a wet-media paper you need to be careful with your water levels. And my recollection from the early 2000s is that students working with alcohol inks and dye-based stamp pads experienced some bleed through.)
So ANOTHER PROBLEM I’m setting for myself when I work on this paper is “How do I control my water on this non-watercolor paper?” And I love playing with that.
If you look at the scan of just the collaged elements you’ll see that I glued a randomly shaped piece of waste paper (used behind journal pages I was working on to catch strokes running off the page) that is actually a piece of Strathmore Charcoal paper in grey.
Now that there are college elements on the page, where and how I place and work the subject I eventually decide to place there, as well as any text, becomes a fun page layout puzzle.
It’s always fun to turn the page and have a bit of a challenge! I find the “surprise” of turning a page and finding collage elements waiting for me engaging.
What to Do in Your Journal?
If you’re interested in this type of journal play it’s simple to dive in.
- Collect a bunch of collage papers (textures, colors, images, whatever)
- Gather some water-resistant markers and pens. (If you’re going to paint your top layer you want the layers below it to be water resistant—or you’ve just set yourself an additional extra problem to solve!)
- Get some glue stick or PVA. I use UHU Blue glue stick, it doesn’t work as well as the old purple, but it doesn’t have the odor of the current white, so I’m happy. If I use PVA I have a little bottle with a form roller on the top and I put the PVA in the bottle, put the collage paper face down on a waste sheet, and roll the glue roller out across the image in a star-burst pattern so that I don’t drag glue under the edges—i.e., only strokes going outwards. I stroke the glue stick on the same way if I’m using gluestick. Then I pick up the collage piece, flip it over and place it on the page, cover it with wax paper, rub it down smooth with a 3m burnisher—looks like a credit card, use an expired one of those if you want— do any other gluing on the page spread quickly, put down a clean sheet of wax paper, close the book, and cover it with weights overnight (or at least 4 hours) so everything dries.
- Get some wax paper (see item 3) and also have a moist towel or paper towel on hand to keep cleaning your fingers.
- If you want to have paint or rubber-stamp ink on your collage page you can do that once the papers have dried, or you can do painting and stamping as a first step. When they are dry you can collage. Both approaches have aspects that recommend themselves and you’ll discover them as you work.
With your papers you can start to collage on just one spread, or through out the book, but I recommend you always work quickly, especially with glue stick, because you want to have weights on it for drying before it dries. Keep this in mind.
I typically collage and pre-paint about 1 page spread per signature in a journal I’m just starting.
I like to do this in the morning after exercising, or before bed. Sometimes I’ll pre-paint in the morning and collage at night. (The danger in working before bed is that you get wrapped up in doing one more collage, one more…)
Then I leave the book under weights until the collaged elements are dry. While working in the book, page by page typically, when I get to a page where there is collage I work on it.
You can of course make collage the focus of your collage work and build collage with no plan for painting faces and other subjects on it. That’s up to you. You’ll find a rhythm and what your aesthetic sense calls for by trying different approaches.
If you do want to work only with collage I still suggest you work in stages. Then when you get to a collage page it will only have a few elements on it and you’ll need to “solve the problem” of how to build the page, and that’s what I’m writing about.
So if that’s your goal, a first step would be pre-painting pages with textures and color, onto which you’ll later collage. You get the idea.
Why don’t you gather some items to collage with today and make a couple spreads in your journal you can discover later?
Wonkiness?
One more thing before we leave today’s portrait.
Remember I wrote about wonkiness in my last post. Today’s portrait was one of my push drawings to “Sketch Anyway” at the end of a fractured day. And of course having the collage paper already on the page spread increased the problem solving factor. (AND FUN!)
Recently a friend who had seen this sketch pointed out to me that the eye-glasses are not symmetrical. I know we’ve all seen eye glasses with weird, asymmetrical design created on purpose. These are not those frames! When you work in pen you can’t erase. When you go wonky you are faced with a choice—to let something go or to rework it. I tend to leave things. (I have a high tolerance for wonkiness in my art.)
The asymmetrical frames bothered my friend. He couldn’t put his finger on it until he’d looked at the painting and “saw it.” Once you see things like this you can’t unsee them. Once you draw something like this, well I unsee such things all the time—I didn’t even realize this had happened until he drew it to my attention. I had been too busy thinking about values, color, and that pesky gray paper. I know I do a end check of things (shadows, values, color, shapes). I’m sure I saw it when I finished the sketch, before the painting. I decided just to let it be. And I let it go mentally, with a note to pay more attention next time! But then I so thoroughly forgot about it that I cease to see it.
If something like this happens to you and you go wonky, make a decision—either live with the result, or try to alter it in some way.
I’m rather spoiled, since I work opaquely in watercolor and gouache so often, I feel confident I can cover just about anything that really bothers me. You can work on that skill for yourself. (I have videos on YouTube and Vimeo where I work over such things with opaque paint.) Or you can simply redraw the lines more accurately before you add any paint—then even a light wash of watercolor over the errant lines will mask them slightly and restate your intention to the viewer.
You get to decide in the moment how you want to handle the wonkiness.
If you are just learning to draw I encourage you to practice seeing and drawing accurately—that’s always the best way to lay a foundation for good visual working habits. But once that skill is established, if things go wonky somewhere, my advice is always to embrace it and move on in the creation of the image. Finish it the best you can, or to the point you were intending to finish. Then have a little talk with yourself about what didn’t go as planned and remind yourself to look out for that in the future.
Some of my students find it helpful to have a written list at the front or back of their journal—a checklist with things like direction of light and shadow placement, and in my case now, I suppose I need to add, unintended asymmetrical eye-glass frames—but I’m not going to loose sleep over it. I prefer to embrace the wonkiness.
