All posts filed under: Get Messy

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 …

Get Messy Season of Contrast, Week 3.

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I let this page guide me as I made it and I love how it turned out.  Almost the opposite to last week where I layered and layered, this page has lots of white space left which I like. I started by making some plain gelli plate prints using the colours I had chosen.  I printed blocks of colour on dry wax paper and old book pages.  Once I had my pages I cut out some shapes as neatly as I could and I tore some shapes to contrast. I wove the green and aqua torn strips, both of which were on wax paper to make the grid on the right page above. The aqua circles are torn out and also printed on dry wax paper. The copper and gold shapes are cut with scissors and were printed on the book paper. I like to see the pages close up, the gelli plate gives an interesting print even with one or two colours. Thanks to Get Messy Art Journal and Jules Tea for the inspiration! …

Intuitive Painting – what a process!

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Today I tried a new thing in my giant Moleskine art journal which is A3 size and perfect for something like intuitive painting which I haven’t really done before.  I don’t often know where a page is heading when I start and I rarely make layers and layers of paint and techniques. I am a single layer painting kinda girl, I might draw or collage on top of that layer, but that is more than likely going to be it. The end. Finished page. So of course I was keen to try some intuitive painting as featured in this week’s Get Messy tutorial. The main aim is to use lots of colour and supplies and equipment and make layers, all of the layers. Random is not my top skill, I always end up making things balance or matching the colours or following a pattern even when I think I am not going to. Part way through the layers for my ‘intuitive’ art journal painting, I thought that maybe I could do a layer of images …

Get Messy Art Journaling. Season of Contrast Week 1.

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For this first week of Season of Contrast at Get Messy I have taken contrast to the extreme and used only black and white! I have enjoyed working with black ink, black gesso and white gesso so far, with a little addition of Posca pen to make the dots on the ombre spread and the details on the next spread.  I tried some ink blots and then couldn’t stop making them!! I find the ink blots mesmerizing to make and to stare at.  All kinds of things pop out of the page.  I always see lots of faces.   For sketchbooks, I  used my giant Moleskine which opens A2 size, medium Moleskine which is A3 when open and my mini Moleskine which is A5 open.  All the sizes! I really like the small gelli prints of fern leaves in my mini book. Prints were made on vintage dictionary paper and dry wax paper as well as directly into my sketchbooks. I think I will leave some of these prints and blots alone and some I …

Get Messy Art Journal. Art 101. Week Five.

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Half magazine and half drawing. Ten Daffodils. Go with the flow, gestural yoga drawings. All I needed for this week’s art journal pages  was this simple folded journal and the ideas from the Get Messy Art Journal members blog. I had other plans for journal pages but I was completely smitten by this journal idea and wanted to fill it up (yes I know it only has a handful of pages!!). To make the journal, I used a page from the giant dictionary I bought a couple of weeks ago at an estate sale.  I like that it has pictures in with the print of the dictionary and I didn’t deliberately pick the page with ‘positive’, but I am pleased I ended up with it.  To be honest I pulled this page because I liked the Portuguese man o’ war jellyfish illustration which is on the daffodil page. This was a fun project and I have a full journal! Happy Thursday x

Get Messy Week Four. Season of Art 101

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This week I have been playing with background ideas and I painted some ombre backgrounds with a view to working on top of the pages.  I have run into a problem though. I don’t want to cover the backgrounds. This is one of my major art journaling issues, I can’t/won’t (delete as appropriate) layer pages.  If I like how the page starts, I like to leave it.  Maybe I will paint some more ombre base pages to work over so that I can keep the original pages. Or maybe I could work over half of each page. One thing I did manage to  do as planned was make up some colours and give them names.  This was a prompt from last week’s Art 101 Season. I came up with an idea to gather colour inspiration as I watched the TV!  As I watched Planet Earth II on BBC America I had my notebook with me and whenever I saw a colour I liked or a colour idea, I noted it down and wrote down the …

Get Messy Art 101. Week One.

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This season of Get Messy Art Journal is all about getting down to the art basics and building  repertoire of techniques and ideas.  The first week was no disappointment, there were tutorials in painting faces and creating backgrounds and lots of mini prompts and ideas pouring out of the Get Messy community! I put my spin on a background using watercolor and pulled out my trusty gelli plate to add the wishy washy colour to the pages of my sketchbooks and I also printed onto some pages from a vintage typewriting book. Lots of sketchbooks are essential for me because I always end up starting many pages at the same time and they all need to dry before I carry on to the next layer or page. I tried various colour palettes and I love these backgrounds. I added a page to a page and I will continue to layer onto this spread. These pages started with a self portrait painted on the inside of security envelopes using a sumi brush and black sumi ink. …

Art Journaling. Get Messy Season of Gifts Week 5.

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I have been playing in my Season of Gifts journal and it is filling up nicely.  I am doing a horrible job at following any prompts, so the gift I am appreciating is the gift of being able to create these pages and share them with you. Because the journal is all kinds of different papers, not many spreads have the same paper on both sides.  This one has water colour paper on one side which I painted a galaxy using the Liquitex ‘muted’ inks and a white ink as contrast. The other side is the back of the red pattern paper which is really crinkly.  I added my lady and gave her a gold border then I drew with white pen and inadvertently ended up with a cat/owl creature on her headscarf. I have a feeling this character will show up some more now I have ‘invented’ her, I love the idea of an owl/cat creature! This spread is a magazine cutting of a landscape with a gelli print on dry wax paper glued …

Get Messy Art Journal Season of gifts week 3-4.

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This week I met a fellow Get Messy member and it was great!  I am in a couple of groups on Facebook and via the interwebs but I have never met any of them in real life. Now I have! We met at the local library who have a room we could use to art journal and paint and make a mess generally!  They even have drop cloths for the tables to catch our painty inky messes. The time flew by as we made ink galaxies and gelli plate printed backgrounds. I had plans to make journals and all kinds of things, but we ran out of time.  So I will be making some journals this week I think so that I can work in some mini sketchbooks in the new year. I took some dried seeds and botanicals which I had previously gathered on a dog walk through the woods, some printed better than others as is always the way with the gelli plate.  I printed on vintage book paper, kraft paper and dry …

Get Messy Art Journal Season of Dreams. Week 6.

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Here we are at the final week of Season of Dreams in the Get Messy community and it has been a lovely season even though I remember one dream a month on average! These pages were inspired by the paints and tools I used as much as the dreams theme, I would never have predicted that the last page would have ended up like this when I was painting the galaxy, but I am so happy that it did. The top page is half landscape from a magazine and the other half is black gesso with white pen detail along with white gesso ‘cloud’ detail.  I added the figure and gave her wings.  Then I splattered white ink over the whole spread. The middle page is a base of grey gesso with a collaged figure.  Details are added with more collage, white pen and a neon pen. Finally, I started with a watercolor galaxy all over the spread then I added the figure and gave her wings using a nib pen and ink. The trees …