All posts filed under: Get Messy

Get Messy Season of Connections. Week Three.

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The season of connections over in the Get Messy art journal community is in full swing and I am really enjoying it. I suppose I do use things with connections to me in my journal just by the nature of the fact that I chose it or chose to draw or paint it, but I am more and more fascinated by this as I fill this journal. For this spread I painted and sprayed and splattered the pianola paper to get started.  When I was merrily slapping paint around, I didn’t have a plan for it, I was just making some background paper. Once I saw the tutorial on the Get Messy blog which covered mixed media self portraits, I thought I would give it a go. I grabbed a handful of library cards (I work at the library, so there is that connection) and painted some self portraits on each one.  I do these very quickly with no sketch or outline, so they are all different even though they are painted from only a …

Get Messy Season of Connections. Week 2.

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I have been exploring connections of all kinds in my art journal this past two weeks since the Season of Connections started over at Get Messy. Once I started thinking about it, connections are everywhere, physical and abstract. I have a strong connection to nature, so there is usually a botanical theme to my journal somewhere.  It may be flower shapes or organic leaves or a landscape or two. So far in this journal I have printed leaves with my gelli plate onto dry wax paper and stuck them in, I have stitched leaves and painted them with watered down sumi ink. A completely random connection appeared when I printed a leave on a page from an old dictionary and when I tore it up to stick down, I noticed that I had printed on a page which had ‘folk dance’ at the top. This is an immediate connection to my maternal grandparents who used to take me folk dancing when I was a kid.  I loved it and have very fond memories of folk …

Get Messy Art Journal. Season of Connections Week 1.

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The new season over at the Get Messy Art Journal community has just started and I have gracefully dived in headfirst. Today I have had nothing but ideas pouring out of my brain. I am not kidding when I say I am surrounded by index cards and scraps of paper with notes on them! I had no intentions of gathering a pile of supplies together, but it organically happened so I didn’t argue. I may stick with them to make the first pages only, or I may use this base ‘kit’ through the whole season. I have some vintage threads to sew photos and other ephemra into my journal along with some needles which are equally vintage. I like the idea of sewing stuff down and I have already done some machine stitching in my book, inspired by the wonderful Vanessa at Dans Mon Crâne. I love vintage thread spools for the thread and the graphics on top of the wooden spool! I made a new journal for this season and this one is a …

Get Messy Art Journal Season of Fairytales. Week Three.

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Week three of the season of fairytales and I am still enjoying filling my little handmade journal.  What I have learnt is that I like to work bigger, this journal was dictated by the size of the book covers I chose, but every time I open it, I wish it was bigger.  We live and lean don’t we?! I did buy a big fat old book this weekend from the local YMCA book fair, which I want to make into a sketchbook full of watercolor paper, but that is another story which I will share when I make it. At the same book fair I also bought a couple of fairytale books which I am using for collage material.  I seem to have landed on The Frog Prince as my fairytale of choice so I am keeping all my book pages from that story. I have been following the daily prompts on Creative Bug this month and today’s was to make a poem from found words. So I pulled a couple of pages from The …

Get Messy Season of Colour/Color Week 5

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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 …

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

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 …

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 …