Purple-y gal, and some thoughts about supplies…

Here's a purple-y gal with lots of oil-pastel green & purple scribbles. Getting out a lot of frustrations in the journaling!

Auset left me a comment and said, "I have just started out with art journaling this June. I have created
pages I love; but I have been frustrated with my favorite mediums
sometimes not matching up (like, I love oil pastels but can't write
over them with my gel pens). I think it's just a matter of getting more
experience under my belt- but I would love to hear your take on
combining the correct materials for newbies."

Great question…here are a few random musings.

I think learning what materials work well together is mostly trial and error. Like Auset, I've done pages with oil pastels only to find that nothing will write over them. I find that as a general rule, I have to add oil pastels as one of my last layers, and I plan not to put anything over them.

In general, water-based products can be layered easily. Oil-based products can go on top of water-based products. However, water-based products don't layer well over oil-based. That said I have been successful using small amounts of acrylic paint over oil pastel, so the "rule" can be broken to a point. For the page below, I drew over the oil pastel with my Stabilo Marks All pencil. That worked will because the Stabilo is meant to work on slick, non-porous surfaces (which is why it works so well on acrylic paint).

Because I use the Stabilo Marks All pencil for drawing, I've started to seal my drawings with Krylon Workable Fixatif. The fixatif helps the pencil marks stay put as I put more layers on top of them. It also protects the drawings from wear & tear of being in the journal. I have learned, though, that ink sprays do NOT like to go over workable fixatif. They will bead up. Acrylic paint will go over workable fixatif pretty well, especially if they are not watered down in any way.

My favorite fixatif is still Krylon Workable Fixatif. I tried the Prismacolor workable fixtif and I hate it…the fumes are even more noxious than the Krylon. I tried Spectrafix (which is a no-fume, non-aerosol product) and it's ok. I'm not in love with it because it is very wet and therefore alters my spray ink layers (because the inks react with the liquid in the Spectrafix).

I've ruined about a million pens trying to write over wet paint and ink.
My best advice for pens is to wait until your paint is dry before you
write! This causes me problems, still, because I don't like to wait for
layers to dry. I have the best luck with paint pens…because paint works well over paint. I like Sharpie water-based poster-paint markers in extra-fine point. They're not a perfect pen by any means, but I get the best results with them. I have some of the Montana Acrylic Markers winging their way to me from Blick as we speak! Can't wait to try them.

Got an art journaling question? Drop me a line and let me know!