I incorporated a few new things in my latest art journal spread, "Hares and Moon." It’s graphite pencil and collage, where the collage elements are pressed autumn leaves and alcohol ink.
So what’s new?
First of all, I’ve used a few of the new pencil techniques that I learned from attending Ida Anderson Lang’s 2025 New Year Drawing Retreat. (Thank you, Ida.) The ones I’ve found particularly useful are smudging and drawing with the eraser to bring back lights.
The other new thing was using dried, pressed leaves in the collage. I was inspired to try using them by an artist whose delightful work I frequently see on Instagram. Unfortunately, I can’t now find her name to credit her (even though I wrote it down somewhere—but where?). A few months ago when the autumn leaves were beginning to fall, I collected some and pressed them. Then, seeing that artist’s work again, I was inspired to get those leaves out and try using them. I decided to put them in an art journal spread since experimenting is one of the things and art journal is for! So I created a suggestion of a landscape where the leaves pose as trees. Originally, I thought I’d fill them out to look more like trees by adding branches with a Stabillo All pencil. With this pencil, the marks activate with water or water-based medium and become very dark. As you can see, though, I ended up not doing it.
Here are the leaves glued in place with Liquitex Matte Gel Medium. I’ve also added a few splotches of alcohol ink, but I couldn’t really tell you why…
And here it when I’ve finished most of the drawing I wanted to do. At this point, I noticed something very interesting, something I’ll remember and use in the future.
I did intentionally darken a few areas around the moon. But the other graphite areas in the background were all done in the same way with an H pencil: close scribbling then smudging to even the tone. But some areas turned out darker than others. I realized that the darker areas were worked over where I’d used the matte gel medium while the lighter areas were worked over the plain paper. Isn’t that amazing? I love the way it turned out. Light and dark by accident! And it turned out that they were well placed even though they weren’t planned.
Now I was having a couple of different problems with the leaves. First, although they were flat as pancakes when I glued them down, once they began absorbing moisture from the gel medium, they began to curl and buckle. I thought a way to avoid this in the future would be to place them (maybe with rings of tape on the back) on the paper then scan and print it, and work from them on with the print. Ha! Those printed leaves can’t curl! But for now, I was stuck.
The other problem with the leaves was that I felt they were too dark. My plan was to wash over them with thinned gesso or maybe to apply thinned gesso (or paint) with a roller. Either way, I thought the texture would be interesting.
But the curling and buckling leaves were bothering me more and more. I was absolutely unsuccessful in my attempts to glue down stubborn parts. Then, I got the idea of covering them with some translucent paper. I considered rice paper or tissue paper (likely too delicate), but in the end, I used white “tea bag paper” which I bought on Amazon and you can see here.
I didn’t know how it would turn out or whether or not I’d want to do something more over it. But I thought it was fine as it was, and to finish, I just strengthened my drawing by adding more darks.
I’m very happy with this one. It will be interesting to see how those leaves hold up over time.
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It will be very interesting to see how the leaves hold up over time. But for now, they work beautifully. I do like the misty look for them being covered rather than super dark and I think it will help stabilize them. But if they do break up, that will be ok too...it will still have that Fall/Wintery feel. I like the autumn-colored blotches and the unpainted rabbits. It all works to make an interesting and unusual spread.