All posts filed under: Creativity

Ways to Forge Creativity into your Day.

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I like to create something everyday, even something small like a layer of colour on a blank page. If I don’t know where to start, colour is my kick off point most times, grab some paints and choose 3 to 5 colours and make a background to work on immediately or another day. Things I might do to fill my creative soul daily – I like to follow an organized prompt based challenge. This month I am taking photos with Susannah Conway’s August Break and art journalling with Creative Bug and Dawn De Vries Sokol. Art Journal a background or finish a whole page in one of my sketchbooks. Sketch a flower from my garden or a mushroom spotted in the woods. Maybe a quick pen sketch or a watercolor impression or a combination of the two. I will pull out my Gelli Plate and see what I can print with it, or try and use my stencils in a new way. There are so many ways to use equipment like this, the results are …

‘I Like’ Friday. The Get Messy Art Journal Edition.

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I have been having some great fun during this first week of the new Get Messy Art Journal season. ‘Get Messy’ is a community of art journalling ladies who hang out via the inter-webs and sometimes in real life.  If you are interested in creating art journals or are a seasoned art journaler, you may be interested in joining. For this ‘season of music’, I made a journal for the first time which was quite a leap, I thought I would not be into making a handmade journal at all. I make enough mess in my art journals and sketchbooks, what if I make the mess of all messes while making the darn book! I chose a small music script in the form of a book which was stapled together to unstaple and add my own pages as well as keeping all of the original music.  I used pamphlet stitch and added tracing paper, mixed media paper and watercolor paper. I soon ended up with a natty little handmade journal to fill. ‘Eine Kleine Nachtmusik’ is …

100 Days of Altered Cards 81-100

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All done. Finished. Hurrah! 100 days of drawing, painting, inking, gluing, stenciling, printing and embellishing vintage playing cards. I am so pleased with my pile of one hundred little pieces of art. Never have I worked on such a small area and I have loved the tiny ‘canvas’ which a playing card presents. There were some cards I didn’t alter because there was only one of them and I wanted to keep them as they are.  I also kept one of each card I used in it’s original state. The ‘Wild West’ illustrations are so cool, I wish I had more of them and the girl in the checked trousers looks like she is equal parts innocence and mischief! Here are cards 81-100 – That’s a wrap! I think I will look for an album to store them in, maybe like one of these Project Life albums.  Or I could keep them in a nice box, but they might get damaged just loose in a box. If you completed The 100 Day Project, well done …

Gelli Plate printing with seed pods.

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Sometimes I find printing with my gelli plate very confusing. There I said it.  Like trying to direct something while looking in the mirror, it is just a skill I do not have.  I still love to play with it though, even when I am not sure whether I am going to get a print with negative or positive colour! I really think this is sometimes when I get my best prints, when I am not sure what is going to happen. I have seen some great prints lately using seed pods so I decided to use some dried honesty plant to make some pages of print and colour. Firstly I decide on my colour palette and  in my mind I wanted these prints to be all blues and blue/greens which as you can see I strayed from a little.  This often happens when I get my paints out and start to put them together, some get taken out and some get added. I will sometimes paint a few sample splotches to see what looks …

Get Messy Thursday. Season of Introspection Week 6.

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This was the last week of the Get Messy Season of Introspection and I am really happy with the final three spreads of my altered book.  I now have a book which started as a guide to growing avocados from the avocado stone and is now a full and splendid art journal. I made these three pages pretty much simultaneously once I had the back ground to the butterfly page. This background was a total experiment with a cardboard tube and cut up foam stickers to make a print roller.  I used my gelli plate as a palette to apply paint to the roller and it worked really well! As you can see in the pictures I ended up printing lots of things once I got started and once I had used the roller as much as I wanted, I pulled a few prints directly off the gelli plate. One of these prints is also used on the butterfly page at the edges.  I printed on dry deli paper because I like the translucent quality. …

100 Days of Altered Cards 71-80.

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We are almost at the home straight of The 100 Day Project and I was thinking why I like it so much.  I like challenges with prompts and instructions which are usually a month long, but this is a different beast.  Over three months of the same (ish) project which you thought up yourself and only really have yourself accountable for. I post my cards on Instagram every day using the hashtag #100daysofalteredcardsbycatseatdogs and that is pretty much my accountability. I know, I know, it could have been shorter! So, here are ten reasons I like The 100 Day Project so much. 1. The time frame is huge but so satisfying (especially once I got into double digits). 2.The body of work you make is going to be fairly big and hopefully useful 3. You can’t help but land on a style or a way of working which you enjoy. 4. I have learnt to work small. 5. I have learnt to take off the pressure to create something amazing each time.  There is always another go …

Get Messy Thursday. Season of Introspection Week 5.

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I have been rolling out of bed this week feeling less than motivated to be honest, so when I decided I had better get on with some art journal pages, my heart did not leap. The feeling was more of a ‘what I am going to do on these pages which need filling with art and meaningful journaling?’ Fill them of course! As you know I am not much of a journaler, so I concentrated on the art bit.  I sat myself down gathered my paints and started to think about what to do. One of the prompts from this season was to use a silhouette, so I decided to have a go at that, once the silhouette was down (it took a couple of goes and there may have been some ripped out pages!) What else to add? I left it for a day or two while I worked on another background and when I came back to it I decided to keep it simple, black and white flower doodles for the win. My …

The same, but different. Sketch the same thing in different ways.

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Last week I was in the garden looking at my tomato plants to see if any were ripe and how huge the beefsteaks are getting.  I like to pop into the garden every morning and see how my tomatoes are doing, it is one of my favorite things about the summer. Nothing better than being able to grow your own veg, even if you only have three tomato plants! All of my plants have lots of tomatoes which is a marvelous thing. Anyway, on the day in question, I spotted a dried up leaf mangled up among my little tomatoes.  I went to pull it out when I realized that it was not a leaf, but a dried magnolia flower from my neighbour’s tree.  Perfectly formed, just with brown petals instead of the delicate pink of the fresh version. In all the years I have lived here, I had never noticed these mini wonders.  I began to look all around the tree and I found a handful of crispy flowers. Of course I did what …

Art Journaling. My style

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This title might make me sound all sure of my art journaling self and my style within that.  I am not, but I am getting there slowly but hopefully surely.  I see many artists who have such a distinct style that I can tell their work from 50 feet.  It is not always the same medium or colour or subject, not by a long way, they just have a style which makes them, well, them. I want this, and I hope that in time I will achieve the same. The thing is, I am not sure I am much of an art ‘journaler’ and sometimes I feel like a fraud. My pages can end up tortured looking because I have tried to do all the things all at once! Adding all the layers, then the magazine cuttings (I really don’t like to use magazine cuttings, there I said it), then the journaling. What in the world am I to write about?  I am not spilling my inner thoughts all over a journal page, not for …

Mishaps come in Threes (or Fours)!

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Blimey, today started as a drag and a chore and a moan. I intended to have a little lie in and go to the gym to run for an hour while listening to one of my favorite podcasts, most likely This American Life or Radio Lab.  Not a bad start to the day. I have decided that running inside is ok when it is humid and super hot outside. I am not a hot weather runner, no matter how much water I drink and how many hats I wear (usually one), I still end up with a head ache all day from being too hot whilst running first thing in the morning. So the treadmill it is then. Yes treadmills are boring, but to be honest I find running so boring anyway it really doesn’t matter to me, the inside of the YMCA is no less interesting than local sidewalks, roads and houses.  If I have something to listen to, I am usually ok, music for shorter jaunts and podcast or a book for longer running …