All posts filed under: Get Messy

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. …

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 …

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 …

‘I Like’ Friday. Get Messy Season of Lists Week 6.

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I thought I was avoiding the prompts this week and then I realized that I had inadvertently incorporated the ‘write the list outside’ prompt very vaguely in the top page.  The prints are made with leaves, gathered from outside. Ta-dah! The list prompts have made for a challenging Get Messy season for me to be honest.  I don’t often incorporate writing in my pages with much success, but I wanted to give it a go. This week I decided to use the prompts not as a list but as a single sentence or idea, is one item classed as a list?  A single item list?  I think not. I do enjoy writing using a Sumi brush (Home is..) but it often takes a few run ups to get it right.  The thing is when you are working over a prepared background and it goes wrong, it is a ‘start again’ situation.  My first go at this page saw me miscalculating the word ‘paintbrushes’ and I ended up squishing it all up by the time I …

Get Messy Art Journaling. Season of Lists, week 5.

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  I have not been very prolific in the art journaling department this week, my time has been sucked into a new crochet project.  My ongoing granny square blanket is coming along very nicely, but it has grown too big to travel with, so I decided in my wisdom that I needed to start new blanket which would be small enough (to start with) to take on holiday with me and crochet like a mad old lady on the plane and at the beach! I am no sitting on the beach girl, I have the attention span of a toddler, so I need something to do, like crochet. I found the perfect blanket recipe at Meet Me At Mikes and after three goes and one yarn change, I finally got going with it and my ‘cheery wave’ blanket will help entertain me on our two week trip to Cape Cod in a few weeks. Anyway back to the Get Messy Art Journaling!  I managed one official prompt which is the ‘I am made of’ page …

Get Messy Season of Lists. Week 4.

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Lists lists lists!  Most of these pages did not turn out at all how I had envisioned.  I had no idea where my crazy eyed skull was going and I really didn’t like the ‘Six Months’ base page until I added the yellow and black. It just goes to show, the best thing about art journaling is where you end up and the fun and mess you can create along the way. If you want to know more about the Get Messy Art Journal community, pop over to their website and see if you want to join the fun! Happy Thursday x  

‘I Like’ Friday. My Art Journal – ‘Get Messy’ Season of lists.

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For this week’s ‘I like’ Friday I have been working on some art journal pages using the themes and prompts from the Get Messy Season of Lists. It turned out to be a classic example of nothing going to plan. I was planning to use the same colours in each page and make all five pages work together. First flaw was that I only made three pages (and I really don’t like one of them very much). Once I got my colours out, I did three base pages using the diagonal ‘stripes’ in the corners using different ephemera and still planning to stick to my grey/pink/green/brick red colour scheme.  I ended up using navy instead of red because it was being used on the eye shaped stencil and I really really didn’t want red eyes (not on this spread anyway, maybe on a page which needs creepy red eyes…). As it turned out I didn’t use the colours anywhere else on the pages, so the colour scheme plan went out of the window right behind …

Get Messy Art Journal. The Season of Lists.

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I am happy to report I am managing to do some work in my art journal almost every day which is something I have been trying to do since I joined the Get Messy community at the beginning of the year. I rarely start and finish a page in one sitting, mainly because each layer has to dry before I add anything else.  This is another reason that I usually have more than one sketchbook on the go. This first page is one I started over a week ago when I saw the fabulous crane in an old National Geographic magazine.  I added a little gold craft paint to the gesso and glued down my bird.  Then I left it.  For ages. I added the triangle doodles and left it again.  Today I finished the page with one of the list prompts from Get Messy Lists – ‘Mysteries to Explore’.  I jotted down a few mysteries and I am not sure that my bewildered crane has any answers! The top spread started as a watercolor …

‘I like’ Friday. Art Journaling Supplies.

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I have been reading a lot lately about the supplies people like to use in their art journaling. These posts are inspiring and helpful all at once, so I thought I would add my two pennies worth and write a post about what I like to use. As I have only been art journaling deliberately for a couple of months, I suspect the supplies I rely on will change and develop over the next months.  I look forward to how my supplies evolve. Of course the first thing we need to journal is a sketchbook.  I have filled a Strathmore 500 series book which has very nice heavy paper and I have just started a Ranger Dylusions sketchbook which has heavy paper too, but is a little thicker.  I can’t wait to fill it up! These are both larger books, 8″x 11″ give or take a quarter of an inch. I like to have lots of space to play with, so I like this size. Pens pens pens.  I use Micron pens in almost everything …

Get Messy Thursday. Art Journal pages.

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Two bright and colorful journal spreads this week! I picked up a pile of old National Geographic magazines free from the library and I used images from the magazines on both spreads. The honey comb in the top spread is from the magazine and the background rice field in the bottom spread. I tried out my new stencil from Stencil Girl in the pink pages, I love how stencils add to a page either as a base layer or on top of everything. I must admit when I added the drippy ink, I wished I hadn’t, but I carried on and I like how it turned out. The green page is mainly acrylic paint and fortune cookie wrappers and fortunes on top of National Geographic pages and a page from an old dictionary.  Lots of layers on this page. I hope you have had a creative week too.  The new Get Messy season starts next month, so if you are interested in joining, pop over and see what it is all about. Happy Thursday.