All posts filed under: Art Journaling

‘I Like’ Friday

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Lots of things to like this fine Friday! A modest trip to Art Mart to get some book tape.  Came out with deep violet high flow acrylic, gold fluid acrylic a new sepia pen and a Jon Snow key chain (for my teen).  Any art shop which sells Funko Pop key chains has my vote! Moon phase stickers from Stickerdoodles. I keep borrowing this fabulous book from the library, it might be time to buy it! Stunning cigarette cards from the gorgeous shop of Beets and Birch.  I adore these cards as I already have lots which my grandma gave me.  Mine are a mix of tea cards and cigarette cards. They were given away in each pack of tea or cigarettes until the 1970’s I think.  Grandma kept all hers and gave them to me in the 1980’s carefully kept in a ‘British Home Stores’ bag! I am very pleased to have these cards to add to my collection. The new Art Journaling magazine has two of my Get Messy friends inside it’s covers …

Art Marks 30 Day Summer Challenge, my journal so far.

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I am joining Rae Missigman again this summer for her Art Marks 30 Day Summer Challenge which started on July 15th. Encouraged to work small for this adventure, I made a little sketchbook using kraft paper and textured paper with a Ray Bradbury paperback for the cover.  I put lots of pages in it so that I could do more pages as I feel inspired and hopefully fill it up. Well, I am nearly halfway through my book and only on day/prompt 12 out of 30, so I am excited that I will fill my little book up!  Yay. Day 1. Dense. Day 2 and 3. Scrawled and Curved. 4. Geometric. 5. Ruled. I had to use part of this vintage ledger page, it is ruled and someone has written Fish and Chips on it! 6. Wide. This wide washi tape was on an envelope my lovely friend send me, I peeled it off before I even opened the letter! 7. Interrupted. I interrupted this girl with a tree. 8. Blurred. Illustrations from a discarded …

Get Messy – Season of Colour Week 4.

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Lots of colour play this week, using a few colours and using lots.  I learnt that I don’t love using yellow! I painted on these vintage library catalogue cards using a very marvelous tutorial and idea from Julia via the Get Messy members blog. What to do with the cards now? I added two of them to a page I started in my Season of Colour journal (made from paper bags and atlas pages).  This page was a fighter, I almost painted ‘I hate this page’ all over it at one point (I am not even a little bit joking!). But I persevered and after a slice of orange in my corner, I jumped back into the ring and finished the page. I am so pleased that I didn’t scribble all over the page in a tantrum! Happy Thursday x

‘I Like’ Fridays. The travel art journal and supplies edition.

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  Before I went on holiday to Cape Cod I used the covers of an old book called ‘Cape Cod Folks’ to make myself a journal filled with watercolor paper, handmade blue paper, kraft paper and some pages from an old dictionary. I am really enjoying using handmade journals because I get to choose the paper, the size of the pages and the overall size of the journal.  Full credit to the Get Messy Bookbinding class for teaching me all I know about making journals.  It really is a great class.  If you want a good book with clear instructions I recommend Esther K Smith’s book called How to Make Books. I have borrowed it many times from the library. Once I was on vacation, it honestly took me a couple of days to get going in my art journal. It would have been easy to leave it in the drawer. I am so glad I didn’t. The first spread I made was awful and again I could have left it in the drawer.  Then …

Get Messy Season of Colour

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You know when you have a fancy box of chocolates and you want to just dive in and try them all, but you know you need to use restraint and savor each one.  Well, this is how I am feeling this week in the Get Messy Season of Colour.  Firstly there are some great prompts which I want to try out, then I looked at the website last night and there are three new tutorials I have not looked at yet. Yikes! I want to quickly zip into each one and see what it is about, but I also want to allow myself the time to read and look at each one and of course have a go at the artistic wonders that lie within! Before I take a run up and jump off the high board, here is my season of colour journal so far. I have taken a different approach this season, not deliberately, it just happened as do all good things in my art journals. One evening on holiday, the boys all …

Painted paper collage

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My new favourite thing is paining block colours onto plain or old book paper, cutting out random shapes and making a collage from them. I don’t use purples very much so I decided to paint some blocks of colour onto some slightly textured paper (This is Sumi-E painting and sketch paper) overlapping the colours slightly but not particularly deliberately.  Of course I had to throw in some gold and paynes grey. Once they were super dry, I cut them into shapes and strips of paper. I really love how the overlap and edges of the colour look so effective once they are in shapes. Then the fun part, sticking the shapes down on a page (in this case, my daily Moleskine). I try and keep a balance of white space and shapes as well as a balance of colour placement. I had swashed some gold over the page already so I stuck the shapes over the gold. I can’t wait to do this again as I have lots of paper and shapes left.  Maybe next …

What do I use from old National Geographic magazines?

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Yesterday was a good day at the library, a patron came in and asked to borrow the cart to bring in some National Geographic she wanted to donate.  You know it is going to be a good haul when a cart is needed! Two trips and over one hundred magazines later, the library was the proud owner of Nat Geos from the early eighties onwards.  As the other librarians were rolling their eyes and getting the recycling bin ready, I was squirreling them away to go through once I had finished my morning’s work. I sat down in the meeting room for one and a half hours and went through each one looking for photographs and images to use in my art journals. I don’t tend to pull much from magazines but I found some great images in this little lot. This was part of a series of historic photos from small towns in Missouri. This is a portrait of Alice Liddell who was the inspiration for Lewis Carroll’s Alice. Taken in 1872. She looks …

Get Messy Season of Contrast Week 6

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The last week of the Season of Contrast has come around so quickly. There have been so many great ideas through the prompts and tutorials, I have not kept up, but that just means a wealth of ideas for me to try in future pages. I am new convert (as of a few hours ago) to paper weaving.  The effects are amazing and I am so new to it, most of what I have done so far (see above) came mainly as a surprise. The process for me is still evolving, but I am loving it so far.  I applied a little planning and then let the papers do the work. For the weaving I used magazine pages and images, a vintage dictionary page and a 1950’s accounts ledger book as well as a painted page from an old book. None of it has made it to my journal yet, the ledger will stay as it is and I may add to the page, but it could be finished now in my opinion. Thanks to …

Get Messy Season of Contrast Week 5

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I set out this week to follow some ideas from the tutorials over at the Get Messy website as well as a prompt or two.  I even wrote down some ideas of things I could do in my sketchbooks. Lots of contrast was achieved I think and I almost managed to leave part of a page blank, but I ended up with some gold and a black gesso ‘hole’ on it instead. I had a go at contrasting patterns in my mini Moleskine and a page of black and a page of white with a little red flower. There are some contrasting colours on the last page which is in my ‘The Shape of Towns’ altered book and I decided to cut a circle out of one page to reveal the head of a statue on the previous page.  Of course once I had the head, I had to sketch in the rest of the statue onto my page. I wandered off from the prompts a little and even got distracted from the tutorial I …

Get Messy Season of Contrast week 4 and rediscovering art supplies.

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Isn’t it strange how seeing things or using things within a different context alters your approach and attitude? I have been whining on about how I never know how to use inks and I can’t get to grips with them especially acrylic inks.  I really want to use them because they have such great colours but I don’t know how – whah whah whah. Today I watched the lovely Amy Maricle on the Get Messy tutorial page demonstrating a lovely technique using circles on a journal page.  She uses Neocolor II crayons and I only have Neocolor I which are the oil pastels and not at all what we need for this.  So I racked my brain, do I have anything else I could use? Way back when I was a twenty something fashion student, I used some chunky water soluble crayons which I adored, so I went to dig them out. In the same shoe box they were stored in were some card making supplies I used to make little cards to sell and …