Dreaming. Dreamscapes. Dream. A couple of art journal spreads this week using dream associated words along with some dream inspiration. If you are interested in joining the Get Messy Art Journal community, go here to read all about it. Happy Thursday x
Do you remember your dreams? Any recurring dreams? I don’t remember them very well, but I do often dream about being late to catch a train/bus/plane or to an appointment. In these dreams, I can never run fast or get my phone to work to let anyone know I am running late. Panic ensues and I wake up feeling stressed. So I made a page with lots of clocks. Whenever I think of catching or recording dreams I immediately think of The BFG by Roald Dahl with his dream catching skills and wonderful language. I will take a ‘phizzwizard’ please, maybe I will catch it in my net! Get Messy is an online art journaling community full of ideas, techniques and support. Happy Thursday x
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 …
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 …
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
Welcome to September! Blimey didn’t August fly by. Pumpkin Spice Lattes are upon us and Halloween supplies are appearing in the shops. I though I would share a few things I have been liking lately – Creative Bug draw-a-day challenge was a success for me in August, I made at least part of an art journal page every day following prompts supplied by Dawn De Vries Sokol in a daily video on Creative Bug. Follow my progress at CatsEatDogsMakes on Instagram. September is a little different in that they have a competition running for a new instructor. So I am going to have a go and use prompts by Jennifer Orkin Lewis who is August Wren on Instagram and well worth following if you like gorgeous paintings. Harmony by Carolyn Parkhurst is such a good read. If you are looking for a good book, I would recommend this highly. Very character driven and a great story so far (I am about three quarters through). I have had Art Inc by Lisa Congdon from the library for a couple of …
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 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 …
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 …
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 …
Clare Davis Etheridge 