Julification, Toni Style

GROUP 1
I have limited colors in the better quality acrylic paints this class needs, and determined to use what I have. However, that means on these first three pages, I had to sacrifice the subtlety of the blended colors Julie used in the video. And I don't have any of the ... erg, what did she call it? Oh! The transparent paint, which also helps to blend the darker space in with the surrounding color. I did three pages at once, to help alleviate my obnoxious resistance to drying time. This page? F'get it. Hate it. eesh. I want to use what I have, but it creates some garish blotches to my eye, just not blendable despite all of Julie's suggestions for doing so. I DO like the way the scratching and texturizing marks I made show through. This one I really like -- kind of eerie, dreamscape-esque, and that looks like an angel floating behind tree branches. Very cool!

I set these up to dry and went out to my patio roost with my feathers full of attitude mites. I mean, who DOESN'T want to take a class and produce beautiful pages out of the gate, ya know? Had to hose all that down, preen away the b.s. bugs, and then think, instead, about what I'd just done, the process, the technique itself, walk through it in my mind with more balanced colors. After a few minutes' sulk and then a pep-talk (& ok, I admit it, a Coors Light), I went back in the studio and ransacked it for the flesh-tone colors I knew I had somewhere, that I'd used on canvases. Good quality acrylics, all of 'em, and I found them, so I tried a second group with raw sienna and burnt umber as the base colors.

GROUP TWO
Much better.
Really glad I went back in and tried again.

For a gander at Julie's pages, visit here. These are her finished journal pages, so you'll have to peer in closely to see these background techniques I'm learning ... but you can also get a feel for why I so want to learn them!