Chain Links

Heart

Art Journal Page with Watercolor and Household Objects

Chunky Bracelet

Still obsessing about what household items I could use to texture,  I picked up a chunky bracelet and dipped it in thin watercolor. Hitting the page just made little circles, but dragging the bracelet made these parallel swooping marks. Oh this is interesting. Going back in with a paint brush to add more swoops did not work, the lines were clumsy and for weeks I did not trust my hand to make good marks on the page, but I am getting over that now.

 

The Composition

When I had a good balanced mass, the overlapping swoops were way too chaotic so I stated to fill in the spots with a paintbrush. Even the same hue had a different tint so you could distinguish the original marks from the fill-ins. It reminds me of tissue slides for a microscope or a textbook diagram of a heart with color coded arteries and veins. As I continued to fill in, I balanced red and blue and balanced the overall image. Completed with added darker blue to some of the shapes to give it a focal point.

The surprise: Generating an energetic painting with a bracelet.