 Hi there, it's Sandy Almak and today I'm going to share 14 different backgrounds, at least the how-tos for 14 of many more backgrounds in this art journal. I bought this thing years ago at a vintage shop and it's clearly handmade by somebody with a lot of TLC and I loved the cover on it so much. I love wrap-around covers, just something about them. And this one has these beautifully handmade signatures. They just poured so much love into this book and the paper is terrible but the book itself is beautiful and I did have to do some learning to work around what was going on with the paper but nonetheless I found that it worked pretty well with a bunch of the mediums I had and I've painted a whole bunch of different backgrounds, I shouldn't say just painted, painted and drawn different backgrounds in a bunch of different mediums and thought I would share some of those ideas with you. I plan to do the doodling and drawing on them during October in October 2021 so if you want to go look at my Sandy Almak Fine Art Instagram that is where those will appear either as still pictures or as reels or both. So idea number one was just to put some color directly on the paper even just squeezing it out from the tube so you get plenty of color and then smush the papers together and you get two pages. And throughout this I was trying to make two pages that work together so that I could do one drawing across the whole spread and I don't know if I'm going to get all that done during each day of October, that's a lot of work but we'll see how I do. Second was Brush Show and it's a watercolor powder that you can put down some water and shake the powder onto or spray after you get the powder on or do both. Like I'm doing here and get a swoosh of color across. Then there's just plain watercolor, just throw on a bunch of different colors and let them mix and put salt on them. I do have a recent video where I talked about salt so I will link that in the doobly-doo so if you want to go see more about how to use salt on your watercolor you can learn how to add that texture. And then I decided I would put a splash of watercolor down and then add Brush Show to it and dab some off so I would end up with that granulation of the Brush Show. And then there's taking Brush Show and painting with it. Brush Show is actually a product that is used to make paints in the, I believe it was the UK I read somewhere that there are schools that do that. So you can do solid colors as well as sprinkling the colors and all different kinds of ways that you can create backgrounds for art journal pages, for cards, for whatever kinds of projects that you're working on. And then there are inks like Distress Oxide so I'm just smushing the ink onto the page itself and then using a brush and some water to move it around. And Distress Oxide Inks as well as regular Distress Inks work great for something like this and give you really interesting textures. And you can stamp them on with stamps or with some of the applicators that are out there. Look at what kind of marks they make. And here I'm pouncing some of the ink through a piece of screen mesh because yes I had to replace a screen door recently so I saved the old screen mesh and yeah so I have chunks of that to use in my artwork. Thank you dogs for running through the screen. So you could also apply inks directly onto the paper. These are just the regular Distress Inks and cover up the brush show that came through the other side of the page. So I found that there was a bit of that, a bit of the bleed through going on but that led me to just putting more of the same kinds of colors on there, mixing it with something that maybe I normally wouldn't in something else and see if I could come up with something that would be kind of fun. Moving the color around with a baby wipe instead of a brush and water. These are more Distress Inks and I applied them with just smushing the color on and then moved it around with a brush and I spritzed it believe it or not with alcohol and I got some really interesting textures out of the alcohol. So it has to be wet for that to seem to work. It doesn't work as much when it's dry but it does do an almost salt like effect. The way salt works with water color, alcohol can do that with Distress Oxide Inks. I haven't tried it with Distress Inks so we'll have to see how that works too. Next up is Art Graph and these are sticks, well not sticks, they're blocks I guess, flat blocks and you can make all kinds of wonderful marks with them and the pack that I have has charcoal, graphite and white in it and if you put it onto wet paper it pulls more of the pigment out from the charcoal and the graphite and you can go over it with a brush. These are all water soluble so you can do all kinds of really interesting effects using water before or using water after or using water for both and leave yourself a background that you can then journal into, you can glue things onto, you can doodle onto whatever you want to do because it's an art journal so it's fun and Inktober is going to be a lot of fun adding drawings into this. I'm going to flip around to different pages based on what the prompt is for the day because I have no idea. I know that they've been releasing them slowly over the last month to give people a heads up but yeah, going to be trying that, it's going to be fun. Next I went for some acrylics and acrylics were really great for fixing pages when they bled through so there were a number of pages where my medium didn't work really well with this paper and putting acrylic on the other side we just completely cover that up and make the page more stable so that it will last longer and you know the medium that might have been tearing through the other side can just be covered and stabilized by this and using different kinds of color combinations I reached into the drawer and just pulled out two or three random colors when I was doing these. I didn't want to make any thoughtful decisions apparently, I felt more like making random decisions so I just tried to see what would come out if I grab different colors and have a drawer full of all different kinds of paints and here I decided to add some of that charcoal into it as well, the art graph, just to add more linear aspects to it and another one I decided to see what would happen if I tried instead of using a brush to do some blending using a baby wipe so I just put down some color, squeezed it out directly onto the paper, mushed it around and then I wanted to flip it around and have the red at the top and the orange at the bottom on the other one and kind of join them in the middle so they look like one unified thing, had to use a new baby wipe so that the red would stay in the red section and I could go back to orange and fill in the rest and it kind of came out cool and it felt like it needed something I needed a little bit of an anchor so to start off whatever the drawing will be on it I decided to add a little tiny bit of black to it and I made a square rectangle just painted a little rectangle there I can't wait to see what I end up doing with that and then I took one that I put a photo in I actually put a few photos or scraps of old watercolor paintings or scraps of alcohol ink paintings or something and glued those in as well but for this one I decided to paint acrylic around it so I went over the edges and then started working my way into the painting or into the photograph just a little bit so that I'd have a rough edge the opposite page since this is a wintry feeling kind of thing I figured the drawing may end up being wintry so I used some blue to mix with some white on the opposite side and then threw in some of the charcoal so that when I painted over top of it and just mushed the color around I would get a really soft gray and blue in it all at once so lots of different beautiful textures there and then I decided to do what I had done on another page which was to really make the photograph feel like it was part of the page itself so I painted over it and used a baby wipe to move the color in a thin fashion right across the surface of the whole picture and then used a clean baby wipe to open up a few places so that there's going to be some spots where that photo really shines and then other places where it's in the mist of the paints and then I used the charcoal art graph to just make a few marks across and a baby wipe to move a little bit of the art graph so that it would feel a little bit like trees so we'll see what that drawing ends up like Copic did not work at all in this paper but Copic air brush works a lot of times where regular Copic marker does not so I used some leaves from the yard to make a leaf pattern I figured some of the prompts might be fall related since it's inktober in october and used the leaves in the airbrush to make just some really interesting background out of airbrush and this is an airbrush gun that you put the Copic marker into and you blow the color over the chisel nib and then it pushes the color out onto the page so there's no cleanup with the whole process I love Copic airbrush for that because you just switch markers there's no washing out the airbrush thing like I used to do back in the day when I was in college and first played with airbrush at all and the process is just much easier and layering all these colors made for a beautiful fall page and I did go over with one last pass of some kind of golden orange color just so that there wouldn't be any stark white in case I wanted to have something that would go over top of it and didn't want to have quite as much contrast below and this last one was a crazy thing that I decided to try I took a watercolor class once where we used pastel into watercolor so we had painted our watercolor and while it was still wet put the pastel in it and I remember from that that pastel gets a little more firmly affixed to the surface of the paper when it's put into watercolor and I thought I'd see if it also worked with water so I just wet the page and drew into it sprayed over it and used a baby wipe to move color around just to see what would happen knowing that I could go over it with acrylic if everything became a horrible mess and I got some interesting sort of ish textures over top of it and once that was all done and I had moved it around I decided I needed something a little more contrasty so I took a darker color and I started mimicking that red line that had appeared in the right hand top section and mimicking it with this bluish color and maybe this is going to be something about steps I don't know I don't know what it's going to be but it was a fun pattern to make just with the side of the pastels adding the pastel on top of the water actually did make the pastel less rub offable which is nice lots less messy and I also want to give you the exciting news that I am teaching a lesson in the gratitude junk journal class this year super thrilled about that and I'm giving away a free seat in the class over on my blog and you can also get registration information and more about the class over there so I would love to see you in class participating or participate in October or do both maybe go get yourself a new journal a new sketchbook maybe a new pen or a pencil that's cool something that's going to get you excited about drawing every day for the month of either October or November or maybe both all righty I will see you again very very soon take care ta ta have a lovely day go make something beautiful bye