This season is flying by and has been one of my favorites which I think may be because I made my own sketchbook from paper bags and an old giant atlas and I have tried to not put any pressure on myself with any of the pages. This has sometimes worked and not always worked if I am honest.

I don’t want a half full book, so I am working to fill it and I don’t want to turn over a page I don’t like without finishing it (I would totally do this in a bought sketchbook).  This has meant that on more than one occasion I have had to slog through a page which didn’t start at all well and keep working on it until it transforms. I am happy to say that I have ended up with successful pages in my eyes.

I have been enjoying the prompts and the tutorials provided by the Get Messy team this season, to the extent that I haven’t done nearly as much as I have been inspired to.  At least I know I can revisit and carry on in between seasons!

I really wanted to make a monochromatic page so I chose purple as my base colour.  A bold move as purple is not my favorite.  I mixed some white, black and grey gesso to provide a variety of purpleness and found a couple of images from magazines as my starting point – which was a black page from the atlas and a shopping bag page!

 

As I painted and covered and painted and covered, I was not loving this page one little bit.  I even picked up my gesso and plastic card at one point to cover the whole lot and start again.

There were a few bits I did like, so I carried on.  The card and paint did have to cover that dreadful writing though!!!

Some china pencil, Posca white pen, a few vintage postage stamps, more paint and all done! If things aren’t going as you want, keep going, it will turn out well in the end!

In complete colour contrast I also made a couple of pages using collage shapes which started as colorful patterns on vintage typing paper and dry wax paper. I did a page of each colour on each paper and cut some shapes from each.

This was the first page I made with the collage paper (on paper bags) and I enjoyed creating it and I kept some negative space to highlight the colours.

I had lots of patterned paper left and the page before (it is the map peeking through on the right) wanted some colour too!

So I grabbed my matte medium and my big paintbrush and ripped the collage papers and glued them down to overlap and mix with each other.  I love dry wax paper for this because once it is glued down the paper is transparent and only the paint shows. I made this last page quickly, only pausing to check the balance of the colours and it is my favorite this week.

If you want to know more about the Get Messy community, visit their website at www.getmessyartjournal.com.  You’ll be glad you did!

Happy Thursday x