All posts filed under: Creativity

Paint and Ink in my Art Journal.

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It is week two in the Season of Dreams from the Get Messy Art Journal community and as well as prompt ideas, we have some great tutorials. I often mix ink and paint, but these pages use two different ideas which I interpreted using  acrylic with ink pen and watercolor with a Micron Pigma pen. The first page was a deliberate attempt to finger paint flower shaped images with acrylic paints and when it dried I went into nearly every ‘flower’ with a nib pen and ink to add lots of flowery detail. I approached the second page quite differently, the base layer is a very loose array of watercolour blobs in a minimal colour choice.  Once the colour dried I looked into the images in front of me and pulled out any creatures I could imagine.  I used the colour and the negative space to find lots of imaginary dream-like beings. When I was splashing colour around the page, I was not at all sure what I would find to draw, if anything at …

Get Messy Art Journal Pages. Season of Dreams. Week 1.

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Do you remember your dreams? Do you write them down? How about dreaming in colour? I sometimes remember them but only very vaguely, unless I write them down (often at ridiculous times in the morning). When I write them down I tend to remember more as I write and end up with a garbled page or two of a dream. Then I go back to sleep and try and make sense of my sleep writing when I get up in the morning when more often than not, I have written more than I would have remembered had I not snatched up my notebook at 2am. The Season of Dreams started this week in the Get Messy Art Journal community. Getting creative in my art journal was not an easy task, the blank page and the blank mind almost stopped me from making any pages at all.  So I decided to look at my dream notes and grab some paints as one of my dreams was full of colours which I had written down. I usually …

‘I like’ Friday.

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The weather has cooled at last and it looks like Fall is centre stage! This week I have been liking: The bag in the photo I found at an estate sale and I love it so much.  It is a souvenir beach bag from Mexico, I think from the 1970’s.  It is housing my new knitting project…. This fantastic scarf at Creative Bug.  I have started it in red wool and I love it, the pattern looks complicated but it is so well explained on the videos, it is very doable.  I can’t wait to wear it. ‘The Girls’ by Emma Cline is a great book so far, I am fully engrossed and intrigued by the story and the characters. I love to read and I always have to have a book on the go, I am an impatient reader though, so if the book doesn’t grab me, I will cast it aside and move on. This one has grabbed me and is hanging onto my attention. Another book I am reading (I know, I …

‘I like’ Friday the Art Challenge Edition.

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There are so many daily challenges around you could chuck a stick and hit a handful.  Challenges which last a week, a month, 100 days or a year are abound, you just need a fleeting glance at Instagram and the Interwebs to find the one for you. The first daily challenge I found and did for 2 or 3 years was Fat Mum Slim‘s Photo-A-Day challenge which is still going strong and I would like to say that it was one of the first daily prompt based challenges.  Take a photo a day using prompts suggested by the blog and post them to Instagram. Simples. I started to see more of these challenges as I started to do them, I am sure they have always been around, it is just I wasn’t looking. Isn’t it always the way, you see what you are looking for. Challenges for hand lettering, painting, sketching, taking photos, taking photos of only one colour, sketching with a specific material, art journaling, they are all out there and I have done …

‘I Like’ Friday -the art supplies edition

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Art supplies how I love them! This week I have been using all kinds of things and I thought I would share my favorites with you.  Hopefully you can share some of your favorites or coveted supplies (I have plenty of ‘wish list’ stuff myself). Paints – I often start with a background using acrylic paints in my art journal which is a good and a bad thing. Good because I don’t have a scary white page glaring at me, and I have something to work with and on. Bad because if I want to sketch something on the page, there is no erasing, no going back.  Of course there is more paint to go over a mistake if necessary! I bought a set of pearlescent watercolors this week and I like the subdued colours and the gentle sparkle. Kind of what I aim for in life – subdued colours and a gentle sparkle!  Now I am after some metallic watercolors which look fabulous. Journals – I always have more than one sketchbook on the …

Get Messy Art Journal Season of Music week 6.

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We are at the final week of the Season of Music in the art journaling community of Get Messy. I really connected with just listening to songs and writing down on index cards some sketchbook page ideas. Colours, shapes, images and a line from the song usually. So I decided to randomly listen to some songs and see what I could make from them. For these pages I used credit cards to add colour, gelli plate prints I had already made, images from a bird book and some sketching. They are super simple, only two or three layers and I am happy with how they have turned out. Creative Every Day! Happy Thursday x

Topping up Creativity.

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I am pleased to say that my creativity levels are usually brimming and this week was no different. Just to keep everything bubbling and brewing in my imagination I decided to get myself onto the Metrolink, jump off at Skinker and scamper across Forest Park to the Art Museum. In fact I scampered to the Missouri History Museum first catching a couple of Pokemon on the way (for my son, I know, I am a good/crazy Mum!).  It was a lovely day, not quite cool, but certainly better than it has been in the humidity department. The Little Black Dress exhibit at the  History Museum is about to close, so the pressure was on to see it.  I wandered the dresses for a few minutes, sketched one or two and snapped a couple of pictures. Honestly I was underwhelmed, I mean it did what it said on the can, there were black dresses, but it was nothing amazing. No matter, the St Louis Art Museum had been calling to me all morning, so even though …

Get Messy Art Journal. 10 songs, 10 minutes, 10 pages.

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Let me just clarify that I didn’t make 10 pages in 10 minutes although that sounds like a future challenge! What I did though is I loved this challenge. It was to listen to one minute each of ten songs which you have chosen (or  you could listen to random songs) and note down ideas and lyrics for a future art journal page. I used index cards for each song. As a non journaling art journaler, I don’t usually include quotes or lyrics in my pages, so I decided to embrace this challenge and listen for some lyrics to use from each song.  This is surprisingly difficult when you only have one minute of a song to draw from. So I have to admit that I cheated on a couple and had to go back and make sure I had got the lyrics correct, I mean if I am going to quote someone, I had better get the words in the right order! Some of the songs I could barely make out some of the …

Art Journaling Supplies I Can’t do Without.

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Art supplies might very well be my favorite thing to shop for.  They are always colorful, always useful, no worries that they won’t fit (they always fit somewhere!), always make me happy.  I literally (not really, that would be weird) skip home from the art shop.  Maybe I am skipping in my head though as I think about my new supplies and how I can introduce them to my existing supplies. Some of my essential supplies don’t even come from the art or craft store, they come from estate sales or thrift shops.  I am talking about the paper and even some of the sketchbooks I use. Oftentimes I will print on paper from an old book or music script, or I will use the whole book as a sketchbook. Another paper I adore is dry deli paper which is not from the art store either (I get mine from Amazon).  It is the paper which you pick out your pastries at the supermarket with or that your sandwich might be wrapped in.  I am …

Get Messy Art Journal. Season of Music. Week 2.

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I just realized how different these two pages are!  Both from the season of music and both influenced by a close time period.  However that time was the eighties and when I was a teen and my taste moved from trend to trend by the minute. Which I suppose is how it should be as a teenager, lots of different experiences in music, fashion, make up and all the things. The first page features lyrics (ha, I use the term loosely!) from the first single I bought for myself – Mickey by Toni Basil.  I loved that record and played it and played it while bouncing around the living room!!! I wrote the words on tracing paper which is between some pages in my handmade book.  I added crazy colour on top of some gesso on the original music pages. The second page I started last week when I glued the gelli plate print to the pages of my book and painted in some neon pops.  This week I painted the names of some of …