 Well, hey there, it's Sandy Allknock and today I'm going to do a distress oxide ink painting in an art journal And this is an art journal that I have made myself out of stone paper I've had some stone paper or should I say mineral paper For a while here in the studio and I've used it a little bit here and there But since I bought an extra pad of it. I just didn't realize how much I had bought I decided I would turn it into a sketchbook because I do find this works great with pen and ink and since I'm a pen and ink junkie It wouldn't hurt to have a sketchbook sitting around so I folded all the paper in half I used gloves in case my oils from my skin would get on it and make the Whatever I'm gonna draw with not stick And then I made a mess out of sewing. I am terrible at sewing anything having I can't darn a sock Okay, I tried to sew this together. I did not do a great job. It is messy But you know, it's my own sketchbook and I'm okay with that. I Trimmed the outside edges as well as the top and bottom to straighten it out because it didn't come out very even But you know, it's okay. My sketchbook can be whatever size it wants to be It is now a floppy sketchbook It doesn't have a hard cover so I am gonna have to add something to it later But I'm gonna deal with that later on For the time being I just took some tape and very carefully tried to get a piece of white tape Evenly on the edge to cover all my bad stitching and just folded it up on the back side So that I would then have something that approximates a decent sketchbook So for today's project, we're going to start by creating the sky When I said that I was painting with distress oxides, I meant it I kind of squished out a little more color than intended. I didn't realize how wet this stuff would be and mineral papers stone papers Are not really water-friendly So I was gonna have to remove a lot of this moisture. So use less. That's all I'm gonna say It's just use less. I tried moving some of it with a cotton ball thinking that would soak some of it up I switched to tissues and that absorbed some of the color and that was great Once I did start to see it drying and like the surface of it was getting more of that chalky look that distress oxides get It was kind of nice for the sky because the sky looked really good now This looks terrible. I have an overhead light on and it was really hard to see things So it was a challenge to film this so I was filming a lot of stuff on my phone So you could get a better look at it because this looks a little less beautiful than it did in real life But here I'm using a baby wipe to lift color and then using a tissue to soften it So a tissue was able to lift out some of the extra color quite nicely and create clouds that were Both very very white and then that were just an off white with just some blue in them so next came the trees and one of the things I started realizing as I was working on this was that Even if I was successful in getting all this to dry finally, I was still gonna have the trouble of This is in a journal. This is in a sketchbook and if I close it I need the green to stay in the green and I need the blue to stay in the blue So I opted for a very horizontal layout and just started putting all the colors Horizontally in the the scene that's down here because I wanted to do the scene where I'm walking with my dog I Love this one spot on my walk where you just kind of come around this corner And if the mountain is out if Mount Rainier is out that day and it's not always out because we have a lot of cloudy days But if it's out, it's spectacular. Just just framed on this one street I was not able to make that street because of Trying to make these trees line up with each other so they wouldn't smush And once it's all dry because even when it's dry these inks remain chalky So when you touch them you still remove some color But I got a bunch of color on there and it was very wet But I thought okay, I'm gonna move on to the ground I'll put some sidewalk there right because I need to have something to walk on in the neighborhood The proportions were off because it makes what I was gonna picture as the houses over there look very far away And they're not very far away. It's a very traditional neighborhood. I live in But you know what the heck I was having fun putting color on the paper and when I'm having fun I don't care if it looks like what it's supposed to look like or not So I just started wishing it around and a bunch of color in the trees and as I started Trying to lift up some of that moisture so it wouldn't be so wet. It really ended up blending all those colors Really well. I know there are blendy brushes. I have blendy brushes here somewhere, but I Didn't trust them to like lift up the color and I needed something to remove the color But see there's there's me and my worries about closing this book So I went for a walk I took my fan and put it right on front of it hoping that it would dry it by the time I got back and It sort of worked. It didn't work great But I was gonna proceed anyway because I wanted to get this project off my desk I have a lot of things going on and what I did was make some masks I wanted to put some houses out here and It's really hard to make a mask stick so I had to cut the mask out of kind of the middle of a sticky note and then hold it down or Cut the mask in such a way that I could just pull the baby wipe and lift the color from like one side of it or something and see if I could make that work and I tried adding color and adding color was messy as well So I had a lot of issues going on here I think I overcame most of them, but This house was interesting because I wanted a peek on it We have a lot of houses that have that kind of you know big pointy thing in the front but my Roof mask wasn't long enough. So I had to move it over and continue putting some of that brown color in there Yeah, the house is a little wonky, but is what it is, right? Used a bit of a cotton ball to kind of blend those in a bit and then it was time to add the mountain I wanted the mountain to be kind of soft in the background and I was gonna use a paper towel for a mask, right? That seemed like a reasonable thing just trim it down kind of in the general shape of The mountain and I've had another piece of paper towel that I was holding over it to try to make it a little more pointed Because it's not a real pointy mountain, but I Lifted some of the color out using a baby wipe Refind it a little bit better This Mount Rainier kind of has two humps on the top of it I ended up having to add some more color in one part and then take away more color on other parts Yeah, I when I play I don't give up on things And that's what I'm doing here is I'm just not giving up. I'm not letting this paper beat me I'm not letting the ink beat me And I'm just determined that I'm going to figure this out. I'm going to figure out how to do it Now just because I figure out how to do it here doesn't mean I'm always going to recommend Doing it like that's not necessarily the case But I added more color to it and then use the cotton ball to kind of take away color so that it would smooth back into the background And I was trying to decide whether I was going to add pen and ink to this whole thing or not The houses did not end up lifting back to white and I was kind of hoping they would I kind of hoped that they'd just get kind of brighter But they didn't So it was time to jump into my trusty pen and ink and add in detail The other thing I realized as I was doing this since I was cutting little funky masks out of sticky notes That my houses are not in identical proportion either So I was trying to fix some of that as I worked across the page So I had at first the House on the left you could see the right hand side this house in the middle You were just going to see the front side of it and then I was going to try to just morph the perspective as I moved across the page And I know a lot of people will never care. It will never be a big deal But for me, it's kind of a big deal. I know perspective well enough to have figured that out, but No, I was too busy trying to I don't know trying to win against the odds here with my paper But I learned a ton from this So even if not everything worked out as planned I learned a lot and I do recommend trying things that might not work I get a lot of people that say well, hey, do you think such and such a medium would work to do such and such I'm like go try it. I don't know I mean, I haven't I haven't tried it. My brain might tell me that something wouldn't work But that doesn't mean it wouldn't The best way to find out if something will work is to just try it Not to scrounge around on the internet to find somebody to tell you if it'll work because they might not know They might not have tried it So here's my finished page. I added mother nature to it and me and the doggie doggy's walking down the street So I wanted to share the other pages that I've done so far in this journal And they're all done except for this one that I showed you today All done so far with alcohol inks lots of crazy fun and see I've put my A glassine in between there just because I was worried about making a mess of it This is a page about my aunt and my aunt who just passed away recently And this is the one that's going to be in the gratitude junk journal class And I will have information about the class in the doodly-doo down below As well as the winner from monday's giveaway. So congratulations. Send me an email. I will hook you up And I'll see you guys again next week. Take care. Bye. Bye